Cross-posted at Education Week On the one hand we have California's drought. On the other hand we have the stunning collapse of the quality of the nation's workforce. Both represent clear and present dangers of the most dramatic kind. California, without skipping a beat, makes one...
Cross-posted at Education Week In my last blog post, I discussed the deference and reverence once afforded educators by elected leaders regarding how to best run the American public education system and how all of that has come to an end. The result of this has...
Cross-posted at Education Week Our school superintendents last in their jobs now only three to four years, on average. The rate of turnover among our chief state school officers is unprecedented. It seems that fewer and fewer people are interested in applying for these jobs. They...
Cross-posted at Education Week In several blogs that preceded this one, I have made the case that mandated annual testing of all students in the United States, when coupled with an accountability regime in which the data produced by those tests is used to make important...
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 The nations with the best-performing education systems have two things in common that have nothing to do with the specific education policies and practices they have embraced. The first has to do with the goals they have chosen to embrace. The second...
Cross-posted from Education Week Not long after our new report on the American accountability system was released, Diane Ravitch responded in a blog. She began with a very brief but accurate summary of the main points I made. Then she quoted at length from a...
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 Those of you who make it your business to follow the PISA survey reports know that, in 2010, the first year that PISA reported results for Shanghai, China, this megalopolis of 23 million souls came out on the top of the world's...
Cross-posted from Education Week Last October, Tom Loveless wrote a post on the Brown Center Chalkboard titled "PISA's China Problem". In that piece, he charged that the authorities in Paris were ignoring the systematic exclusion of migrant students from the reported scores on the PISA assessment...