I am an Educational Consultant. One of my areas of expertise is School Reviews. The largest problem is that teachers can no longer focus on the 'art of teaching' in America. Education used to begin in the home. Now, parents seem to fell like learning is a spectator sport. That being said, with so many students at so many levels of performance, the average classroom teacher is focused on the 'middle'. The high functioning students are not challenged and the low performers fall through the cracks. Even though reserach shows smaller class size lends to better academic gains, we increase the class sizes and wonder why the achievement gap is widening. Even the charter school model of management consulting (get them young, straight out of school, masters in their content area, not in child development or teaching methodology, work them to death-an average of 2 years, and then recuit the next batch) gets results in the middle grades, but because we fail to teach children how to think critically, the end result is still low performance. For a field that collects more data than the IRS, we don't pay attention to the data in terms of modifying out approach to instruction. My first quesion to all teachers is: what is the impact of your teaching on learning; my second is always...'how do you know'? What is the evidence? It can be as simple as showing students how to add double digits, asking them to practice, giving a problem, giving the answer and asking for a show of hands about how many got it correct and how many can explain how they arrived at the answer. Hopefully, they can all explain how even if in different ways and support their logic. If less than 50% get it correct, you re-teach; you don't go on to the next subject because it is going to be on the standardized test!!!