Teacher quality research

Good teachers improve performance of peers
The talents of great teachers appear to have a positive effect on their peers, according to North Carolina's report. Researchers looked at 11 years of state school data and found results suggesting that high-performing teachers' abilities not only resulted in better student performance in their classroom but in others at the same grade level. "If it's true that teachers are learning from their peers, and the effects are not small, then we want to make sure that any incentive system we put in place is going to be fostering that and not preventing it," said a co-author of the study.
Jackson, C., & Bruegmann, E. (2009). Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning. Cambridge: National Bureau of Educational Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w15202.pdf

National library status report

There's some very interesting info in the document about the state of school libraries in the US, including staff. And, when compared to the prior SASS report, should shed some important light on the health of the profession. The report contains information broken down by grade, school type, school size, school location, and SES level. Researchers can apply to NCES to receive access to the entire data set.
National Center for Educational Statistics
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2009322

Female math anxiety research

Women teachers could be passing their math anxiety on to girls, according to University of Chicago researchers who surveyed the attitudes of female first- and second-grade teachers about math. Researchers found that girls with teachers who were uneasy about the subject were more likely to believe that boys were better than girls at math. Female students who believed the stereotype scored lower than other students on math tests, the study found.
Sian Beilock & Susan Levine. Female Teachers' Math Anxiety Affects Girls' Math Achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

National school libraries report

AASL's 2009 national survey of school libraries has been published. A special emphasis was placed on questions about teaching to ELLs. Main findings were that libraries increased hours and collections, but their budgets didn't.
AASL. (2010). School Libraries Count. Chicago: ALA.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/researchandstatistics/slcsurvey/slcsurvey.cfm

Reading research

Research shows brain connections improve with reading practice
Students who practice reading can strengthen their brains -- especially the white-matter connections essential to learning, according to research by scientists at the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Researchers scanned students' brains, then enrolled struggling readers in an intensive reading program. Researchers again scanned students' brains, this time after 100 hours of reading practice, and found the training improved "not just their reading ability, but the tissues in their brain."
Marcel Just and Timothy Keller. (2009). Altering Cortical Connectivity: Remediation-Induced Changes in the White Matter of Poor Readers. Neuron, 64(5) pp. 624 - 631

Teen literacy report

Literacy instruction: The key to education reform
A new report pinpoints adolescent literacy as a cornerstone of the current education reform movement, upon which efforts such as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act must be built.
Carnegie Corporation of New York. (2009). Time to Act: An Agenda for Advancing Adolescent Literacy for College and Career Readiness. New York: Author.
http://carnegie.org/literacy/tta/

Reading research

Surrealism improves learning skills
Reading Franz Kafka’s The Country Doctor or watching Blue Velvet by director David Lynch could make you smarter, according to research by psychologists at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia. Exposure to surrealism apparently enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.
Travis Proulx & Steven J. Heine. (2009). Connections From Kafka: Exposure to Meaning Threats Improves Implicit Learning of an Artificial Grammar. Psychological Science (Sept.), p 1125-1131.