Cross-posted at Education Week. Mike Petrilli, one of the most thoughtful members of this country's education commentariat, wrote a note to me the other day about a blog I'd recently written. The blog was about the need for more research to determine why some education systems...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine that you are the new superintendent of schools in a city school district in which the majority of students live in concentrated poverty. You conceive of your job as getting your students ready for some sort...
Cross-posted at Education Week. In 1954, the Supreme Court, led by former Republican Governor of California Earl Warren, overturned Plessy vs. Fergusen, the 1896 decision in which the Court had ruled that racial segregation in the schools was permissible under the Constitution as long as the...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Western educators tend to ascribe the success of Asian students on international assessments of student performance to Asian culture, by which they seem to mean the high value that Asian families place on student achievement and success in school. Those with deeper...
Cross-posted at Education Week. Consider Shanghai. Now one of the best-performing education systems in the world, according to the OECD, it had no education system at all in 1978, when Deng Xiao Ping took the reins in China. It had been destroyed by Mao during the...
Cross-posted at Education Week. In my first dispatch from Hong Kong in this series, I described the Diocesan Boys School: low beautiful colonial buildings on a leafy campus scattered across acres of land on a priceless Hong Kong hilltop, the lovely harmonies of English choral music...
Cross-posted at Education Week Two weeks ago, I published a blog post suggesting that some leaders of the civil rights community might want to reassess their support for annual testing in the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Since then Kati Haycock and Jonah...
Cross-posted at Education Week So we now have the civil rights community accusing those who oppose annual accountability testing of deliberately undermining the civil rights of minority children. The No Child Left Behind Act required not only that students be tested each year in grades...
Cross-posted at Education Week David Brooks wrote a column that ran in the New York Times on May 1 that got me thinking. In it, he points out that the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood that Freddie Gray lived in was not exactly neglected. Yes, Gray was poor. But...
Cross-posted from Education Week The Supreme Court ruled in Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896 that separate schools for minority students were constitutional as long as they provided educational services that were equal to those provided majority students. In 1954, in one of the most important cases...