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...
Cross-posted at Education Week. A while back, I announced that I would be stepping down as the CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy and, after a six-month sabbatical, returning as Senior Fellow, devoting most of my time to research and writing. The...
Cross-posted at Education Week. In my last blog post, I described our teachers colleges as the weakest link in our education system, explained why and said that nothing would change unless the states take a very strong role in strengthening them. In this post, I'll have...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Our schools of education are the weakest link in our public education system, and, of all the system's parts, they may be the hardest to change with the tools available to policy makers. Perhaps that's why we don't really even try. It is...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Twenty-five years ago, David Osborne, a journalist now based at the Progressive Policy Institute, and Ted Gaebler, a former city manager, wrote a book called Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector that got a lot of attention...
Cross-posted at Education Week. In the British pubs, as the evening comes to a close, the bartenders intone the words, "It's time, it's time." NCEE is not a pub, but it is time. I will be 79 come November. Some two or three years ago, I began...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Many educators think that young people's understanding of the world is built by enabling them to accumulate a growing pile of important facts. But communications experts have long known that stories trump facts every time. Stories are explanations of how the world...