Cross-posted on Education Week Much has been written in recent months about the skills gap — the gap between the skills people seem to have and skills that employers need. So, when I saw that 60 Minutes was doing a segment on the topic last week,...
Cross-posted on Education Week I just returned from a week in Australia and another in Singapore, and found much food for thought in both. Mining is by far Australia's biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia's biggest employer. I learned that once a...
Cross-posted on Education Week We were gathered around a table in the office of a key state official. In the middle of the table was a chart. On the vertical axis was a scale showing the scores of entering students in the state's teacher education institutions...
Cross-posted on Education Week I recently read with horror of students in South Korea who arrive at school early by American standards, stay through lunch and dinner, and don't get home until after midnight. This is their regular routine! Little wonder, I thought, that they score...
Cross-posted on Education Week A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the theory and practice of choice and markets in the education arena. I got a couple of responses I would like to share with you. One from Adam Emerson at the Thomas...
Cross-posted on Education Week Ray Marshall, Secretary of Labor in the Carter administration is a distinguished labor economist - and personal friend - who long ago decided that education is perhaps the most important key to broadly shared prosperity in modern industrial economies. So he has...
Cross-posted on Education Week Choice is, as they say, as American as apple pie. Why shouldn't we be able to choose a school for our child among all the public schools our tax money pays for? Especially now, when there are so many different kinds of...
Cross-posted on Education Week David Brooks is, in my view, one of the most thoughtful and well-informed columnists writing today. So I was delighted to see that he had written a piece on the Chicago teachers' strike. Delighted, that is, until I saw what had written. In...
Cross-posted on Education Week I will weigh in on the substantive issues in the Chicago strike next week if it has not been settled by then. But here, in this blog, I offer a few reflections on the circular (dog bites man bites dog) character of...
Cross-posted on Education Week On August 15, the Washington Post ran a column by Marion Brady on the Common Core State Standards. It was very well written and expressed very well, I thought, the objections to the CCSS that many good teachers have felt but not...