Au Revoir In August 2018, NCEE issued a press release announcing that, after 30 years at NCEE’s helm, I would be stepping down as our CEO and Tony Mackay would be taking over. We envisioned a period of transition during which I would serve as Vice-Chair...
The American Rescue Plan Act: The Wrong Debate There is a big debate among Democratic economists about the American Rescue Plan Act that will strike most educators as a bit wonkish. But educators should be paying close attention. Some applaud the idea of legislation that provides financial...
What “Building Back Better” Might Mean for Education and Job Training in the United States Two Americas are emerging from the pandemic. One features well-paid, highly educated, technically adept workers who can do much of their work sitting at a computer at home. The virus forced...
Charter Schools Are a Band-Aid When a Heart Transplant is Needed This blog is adapted from an email conversation between Marc Tucker and Michael J. Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in which Marc was responding to Mike’s recent article, “The case for urban charter...
Getting Teacher Professionalism Right: Notes for the Biden Administration Years ago, Finland closed down its nearly 50 teacher preparation programs and opened eight new ones in its research universities. In one stroke, it had limited who would become teachers in Finland to those high school students...
Mobilizing the Nation to Save the Students Hardest Hit by the Coronavirus Pandemic The press is full of stories about the massive loss in learning caused by the raging virus. Several districts in the Greater Houston area reported that nearly half of their middle and high...
What Comes Next? I think of this as the poisoned election, one in which Americans with utterly different views of history and of the future are afraid that the other side will so poison our politics as to threaten what they value most in their way...
Teaching First Grade in the Shadow of COVID-19 My daughter-in-law Stephanie is a veteran first-grade teacher. If you close your eyes and dream of the teacher you would like your grandchildren to have as they begin their years in school, you would be dreaming of Stephanie:...
COVID-19 Will Force Us to Redesign Our Higher Education System for Lifelong Learning; You Won’t Recognize It When It’s Done Higher education is in crisis. The proximate cause is COVID-19, which has crippled college and university revenues and greatly increased their costs. Many will face bankruptcy...
Could Hubris Be the Reason U.S. Schools And Our Pandemic Response Lag So Far Behind? For those of us whose focus is on schools and education, the way the world is learning to cope with COVID-19 should be, shall we say, instructive. The news is full...