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. That's, more or less, the title of the article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Saturday Review section last weekend. It was written by Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve and Adrian Woodridge, the political editor...
Cross-posted at Education Week. I was at a meeting recently at which one of the participants, the head of one of the world's most admired national education systems, in explaining both the success and the fragility of his system, said, "The whole things rests on trust." The...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Last week, I wrote a blog commenting on the draft policy on performance standards recently issued by the National Assessment Governing Board. In it, I called for performance standards based not on people's opinions about what constitutes basic, proficient and advanced performance...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Forgive me if I am a little cynical about the eternal dance between measurement and accountability when it comes to reporting on the progress and achievement of American school children. From the beginning, the leaders of our state education systems have invited...
Cross-posted at Education Week. First, a shout-out to Hank Levin, who wrote me to point out that, in attributing a Nobel Prize in Economics to Nikolai Kondratieff in a recent blog, I awarded him a prize that did not yet exist when he died. That was...