by Marc Tucker “I love the uneducated,” said Donald Trump…many times. As well he might. If he is elected president, it is the uneducated who will have put him over the top. Neither candidate has said much about education, but, in fact, the whole election is...
by Marc Tucker A new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, No Time to Lose: How to Build a World-Class Education System State by State, wastes no time in getting to the point. “The bad news,” it says in the very first sentence,...
by Marc Tucker We start from the assumption that policy should aim at getting a first-rate teacher in front of every student. Then we note that the research on expertise says that it takes about 10 years to become an expert in just about any...
by Marc Tucker I was in Hong Kong recently, having breakfast with two good friends, both of them key players in the development of Hong Kong’s education system, which has for years topped the world’s student performance league tables. The conversation turned to comparisons of...
by Marc Tucker I recently interviewed Charles Fadel for this column. Charles is the Founder and Chairman of the Center for Curriculum Design and a visiting scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has studied physics, electrical engineering, and business. Starting his career...
by Marc Tucker Over the years, our organization, the Center on International Education Benchmarking at NCEE, has shown that the nations with the most effective schools have evolved, highly complex education systems composed of many integrated subsystems. Each subsystem is well designed, in the sense...
by Marc Tucker There seems to be virtually universal agreement that, once goals are established for improving education systems, the means chosen by policymakers and practitioners for reaching those goals ought to be based on scientific evidence whenever possible. Indeed, in the latest version of...
by Marc Tucker Educational technology is once again in the news. The OECD is out with a new report showing that heavy investments in classroom computers have not improved student achievement in the dozens of countries studied. This report should come as no surprise, given...
by Marc Tucker NCEE, the organization I head, runs the biggest and most successful program for training school principals in the United States, the National Institute for School Leadership. But we see a way to make it even better. We are more convinced than ever...
by Marc Tucker Why do some countries grow rich and others languish in poverty? This is the question addressed in a very important new book, The Knowledge Capital of Nations, by Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann, and in a paper by the same authors titled,...