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...
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: Everything Flows from High School Redesign In my last blog, I described how the state of Maryland decided that it wanted an education system for its students as good as the best-performing systems in the world, and engaged our organization, the National...
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...
On Monday, February 17, in an unprecedented joint session, the Maryland legislature gathered for a marathon hearing on a revolutionary piece of legislation aimed at transforming the state’s education system, the first step on the path to a final vote later this Spring. The committees...
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...