On a recent trip to England, CIEB Director Betsy Brown Ruzzi talked with Matt Sanders, lead education policy advisor in Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s office, to discuss the recent changes to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) that the government launched in mid-September. Some...
Cross-posted on Education Week Much has been written in recent months about the skills gap — the gap between the skills people seem to have and skills that employers need. So, when I saw that 60 Minutes was doing a segment on the topic last week,...
Cross-posted on Education Week I just returned from a week in Australia and another in Singapore, and found much food for thought in both. Mining is by far Australia's biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia's biggest employer. I learned that once a...
Cross-posted on Education Week I recently read with horror of students in South Korea who arrive at school early by American standards, stay through lunch and dinner, and don't get home until after midnight. This is their regular routine! Little wonder, I thought, that they score...
Cross-posted on Education Week A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece about the theory and practice of choice and markets in the education arena. I got a couple of responses I would like to share with you. One from Adam Emerson at the Thomas...
Cross-posted on Education Week According to Andreas Schleicher, there is no evidence from the PISA data yet of a consistent relationship between the use of education technology and superior student performance. That, however, certainly does not mean that no such relationship will exist in the future,...
Cross-posted on Education Week I turned on NPR the other day and heard the interviewer ask Senator Harkin why his committee, in its new report, had gone after the for-profit vocational schools so aggressively. The Republicans, the interviewer explained, were pointing out that the public community...
Cross-posted on Education Week This week, the University of California, Berkeley was the latest to announce that they are joining forces with Harvard and MIT to offer free online learning through edX, a provider of massive open online courses (MOOC). A competing provider, Coursera, was created...
Cross-posted on Education Week My older son went to the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). Toward the end of the first year, he called me up. He was obviously nervous. He told me that wanted to major in electrical engineering. If he changed colleges...
Cross-posted on Education Week I got some bad news this week. It has to do with one of my grandchildren, who attends public schools in Maryland in a pretty upscale county. I'll call her Judy. She is 11, a very strong student. When Judy was in...