Cross-posted from Education Week In my last blog, I described the devastating effects of the prevailing American accountability system on teachers in the United States. In this blog, I will turn the tables and describe how the countries with the best-performing education systems approach accountability system...
Cross-posted from Education Week In my last blog, I described the devastating effect of test-based accountability and the current vogue of using value added methods for teacher evaluation on the profession of teaching. But I also acknowledged the need for strong accountability systems in public education. ...
Cross-posted from Education Week In my last blog, I pointed to the data that shows that, after 10 years of federal education policies based on test-based accountability, there has been no perceptible improvement in student performance among high school students (which, when you get right down...
Cross-posted from Education Week California has announced that it intends to take a breather for a year from the annual testing required by federal law until it can put much better tests—aligned with the Common Core—in place to drive its accountability program. The Administration says the state...
Cross-posted from Education Week For years following the release of the 2001 and subsequent PISA results, edutourists visited Finland hoping to uncover their secrets. In the most recent survey, Finland's position had slipped from 2nd to 5th in reading, from 6th to 12th in mathematics and...
Cross-posted from Education Week With each new report from the PISA surveys, the United States drifts a little further down the international rankings of national school performance. You might think that would concentrate the minds of our federal policy makers. What we have instead is a...
Cross-posted from Education Week I read a news story the other day that made my heart sink. It was written by a professor in a business school at a public university. He told a tale in which his colleagues agreed that the writing skills of their...
Cross-posted from Education Week Three years ago, the OECD asked our organization to help them prepare what has turned out to be the first in a series of reports, Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education: Lessons From PISA for the United States. We began that...
Cross-posted from Education Week So the top-performing countries move a little further ahead of us and the gap widens. In most OECD countries this news would be a call to arms. Their education leaders would be combing the PISA data on the top-performers to see what...
Cross-posted from Education Week You should take a look at Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School, a new book by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson and Ludger Woessmann. It does as nice a job as I have seen anyone do of describing the performance...