Cross-posted at Education Week. How can you not like this man and admire him? He comes across on every page as smart, honest, decent, articulate, knowledgeable, humble and deeply caring. Who could wish for a better advocate for the children many of our schools are failing...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Many educators think that young people's understanding of the world is built by enabling them to accumulate a growing pile of important facts. But communications experts have long known that stories trump facts every time. Stories are explanations of how the world...
Cross-posted at Education Week. You have just been made commissioner of education in your home state. Your maiden speech is coming up. It’s your chance to lay out your agenda and get statewide support for it. But what is that agenda? You know your state can provide...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Anya Kamenetz recently did a story for NPR in which she reported that the authors of A Nation at Risk, the famous 1983 U.S. government report on the nation's schools, "...
Cross-posted at Education Week. The April 1st Washington Post carried an op-ed by Arne Duncan, President Obama's Secretary of Education titled, "People are saying education reform hasn't worked. Don't believe them." On April 10, Education Week announced the most recent results from the National Assessment of...
Cross-posted at Education Week. It is not often that I describe a book I have read as a treasure, but David Driscoll's Commitment and Common Sense: Leading Education Reform in Massachusetts is exactly that. The book, written in the form of a memoir, is mainly the...
Cross-posted at Education Week. The United States appears to have taken sides in the great Middle East confrontation between Shia Islam and Sunni Islam, which is to say, in geopolitical terms, between Iran and Saudi Arabia. We have chosen the Saudis. And, in choosing the Saudis,...
Cross-posted at Education Week. In last week's blog, I pointed out that, when the first PISA results were released in 2001, students in Germany and the United States both performed at about the average for all countries in the survey, but Germany reacted with what came...
Cross-posted at Education Week. The lead article in our current Center for International Education Benchmarking newsletter reports on an interview with Andreas Schleicher, the head of the OECD's education program, on Germany's rise in the PISA league tables. Before the first PISA survey was administered in 2000,...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Many American educators have a rather smug view of Asia as the home of rote learning and nose-to-the-grindstone schools. While this may have been true years ago, a new report from Asia Society should put that image to rest. "Advancing 21st Century...