New Announcements
On February 23, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) announced that Robert L. King, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, and Robert Schwartz, Francis Keppel Professor of Practice in Educational Policy and Administration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) had joined their Board of Trustees.

“Bob King and Bob Schwartz are two of this nation’s most highly respected educators and the National Center is fortunate to have them on its Board of Trustees,” said Marc Tucker, President and CEO of NCEE.  “Bob Schwartz brings his experiences as a high school teacher, principal, a governor’s education advisor, foundation executive and university dean to the National Center which is deeply involved with benchmarking the top-performing education systems around the world – many systems that Bob knows well.  Bob King also has had a sterling career in government at both the state and county level.  His efforts to bring best-in-class educational opportunities to all of the students in the states he has led have made him an invaluable partner in the National Center’s work on bringing world-class instructional systems to U.S. high schools.” Read the full press release here.

NCEE in the News
In his Education Week blog, Top Performers, Marc Tucker reviews How Well Are American Students Learning?, the latest report out of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, and reinforces that raising academic standards is an integral step in a much larger process to develop powerful instructional systems to raise student achievement. Marc also blogs about his proposed education agenda for the next American president, the death of vocational education and the demise of the American middle class, and more in Top Performers.

In the Des Moines Register, Head of Iowa State Department of Education Jason Glass, writes about lessons learned from Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (NCEE’s latest publication) and how they could inform an education reform package currently being considered in the state.  District Administration magazine interviews Marc Tucker and asks, “What Can U.S. Schools Learn from Foreign Counterparts?” Atlanta Journal Constitution education reporter Maureen Downey explains why American politicians and educators should pay attention to successful school reform models elsewhere in the world. Read these stories and more here.