Cross-posted at Education Week Why do some countries grow rich and others languish in poverty? This is the question addressed in a very important new book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations, by Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, and in a paper by the same authors titled,...
Cross-posted at Education Week In several blogs that preceded this one, I have made the case that mandated annual testing of all students in the United States, when coupled with an accountability regime in which the data produced by those tests is used to make important...
Cross-posted at Education Week Commencement speakers typically exhort their captive audience to follow their dream instead of being careerists. Everyone else is telling young people to be practical, forget the liberal arts, pick out a career in a high-demand field and go for it. In an...
Cross-posted at Education Week Two weeks ago, I published a blog post suggesting that some leaders of the civil rights community might want to reassess their support for annual testing in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Since then Kati Haycock and Jonah...
Cross-posted at Education Week Stories about computers taking jobs away from humans are in the news these days. This blog will turn the tables, at least a bit. It is about the need for teachers to take on a job that computers have long done: scoring...
Cross-posted at Education Week So we now have the civil rights community accusing those who oppose annual accountability testing of deliberately undermining the civil rights of minority children. The No Child Left Behind Act required not only that students be tested each year in grades...
Cross-posted at Education Week The nations with the best-performing education systems have two things in common that have nothing to do with the specific education policies and practices they have embraced. The first has to do with the goals they have chosen to embrace. The second...
Cross-posted at Education Week David Brooks wrote a column that ran in the New York Times on May 1 that got me thinking. In it, he points out that the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood that Freddie Gray lived in was not exactly neglected. Yes, Gray was poor. But...
Cross-posted at Education Week One of many features of high performing education systems is a qualifications system. A qualifications system defines key gateways, the same for all students, as they progress from the first grade through the end of high school. There are only a few...
Cross-posted at Education Week My organization is currently advising a state on a comprehensive state education reform plan based on the strategies used by those countries with the most successful education systems. At a statewide meeting a couple of weeks ago, I was asked how I...