COVID-19 and Our Schools: The Real Challenge When the full scope of the COVID-19 crisis became clear earlier this year, most states shut down their schools for a few weeks, hoping that the crisis would pass quickly. Colleges and universities did the same. Now schools are...
Race in America 2020 There were slaves from Africa in the American colonies in the early 1600s. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, more than a hundred years later, with its simple, clear and inextinguishable phrase about all men being created equal, he owned...
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future: An Essential Investment, Now More than Ever In my last blog, I reported on the extraordinary—and successful—effort made by the Maryland legislature to pass the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future bill in the few hours left in a session brought to an...
Groundbreaking Maryland Education Reform Bill Passes in Midst of Coronavirus Crisis We are all now focused on the virus that threatens to take the lives of millions all over the world and to gravely impact our economies as it does so. As restaurants close, events are...
The latest results from the triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) surveys are out. Four Chinese provinces topped the league tables again. And again, it is so obvious to the critics that China must be cheating that they argue the results should be dismissed...
Regular readers of this blog know that I frequently point out that the United States spends a lot more per student than the countries with the best student performance. But you may have also noticed that, in the same breath, I am quick to point...
Not long ago, I was reading a recent statistical report on the condition of education worldwide that had gotten a lot of attention in the education press. I was fascinated by the insights contained in the analysis that accompanied the numbers. So, I resolved that my...
The air is full of talk about the taxpayers paying for much if not all of the costs of getting college and university credentials. Little wonder. The cost of getting a four-year degree has been increasing at twice the rate of inflation for decades. In...
In my last blog, I pointed to what I take to be a fatal flaw in the prevailing paradigm of education research. While people with many disciplinary backgrounds do education research, the paradigm on which it is largely based is built on clinical medical research. ...
Many years ago, in 1971, I was asked to join the White House unit set up to plan for the establishment of the National Institute of Education (NIE), a new federal agency to be exclusively focused on education research. Since then, the people of the...