The air is full of talk about the taxpayers paying for much if not all of the costs of getting college and university credentials. Little wonder. The cost of getting a four-year degree has been increasing at twice the rate of inflation for decades. In...
In my last blog, I pointed to what I take to be a fatal flaw in the prevailing paradigm of education research. While people with many disciplinary backgrounds do education research, the paradigm on which it is largely based is built on clinical medical research. ...
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...