The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future: Everything Flows from High School Redesign In my last blog, I described how the state of Maryland decided that it wanted an education system for its students as good as the best-performing systems in the world, and engaged our organization, the National...
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future: An Essential Investment, Now More than Ever In my last blog, I reported on the extraordinary—and successful—effort made by the Maryland legislature to pass the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future bill in the few hours left in a session brought to an...
Groundbreaking Maryland Education Reform Bill Passes in Midst of Coronavirus Crisis We are all now focused on the virus that threatens to take the lives of millions all over the world and to gravely impact our economies as it does so. As restaurants close, events are...
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. 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. The United States, long widely regarded as the world leader in education, peaked and leveled off in the 1970s, while a growing number of other countries came from behind to far exceed American performance. Why? If we knew the answer to that...
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. 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...