By Marc Tucker That’s the question we were recently asked by a Chinese colleague. It was not asked in a hostile way. The Chinese are on the verge of a major overhaul of their vocational and technical education system. They are looking around the world to...
How should standards, curriculum, instruction and assessment be connected? In many top-performing countries, this is a settled issue. But that is not true in the United States, where this question is now hotly debated. I asked Jim Pellegrino, Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the...
By: Marc Tucker Ben Jensen, education director of the Grattan Institute in Australia, recently produced the best analysis of the way markets do or don’t work to produce improvements in school performance I have yet seen. Overcoming the methodological difficulties that have plagued such studies in...
By Marc Tucker England and Scotland may both be part of Great Britain, but they do not share a primary and secondary education system. Indeed, those two systems appear to be headed in decidedly different directions. Michael Gove, the rather energetic English education minister, is worried. The...
Marc Tucker recently spoke with Ben Jensen, School Education Program Director at the Grattan Institute in Australia, about Shanghai’s professional development system for teachers. Ben is a highly regarded analyst and commenter on school education. He previously worked at the OECD Education Directorate where he...
Marc Tucker recently interviewed Kai-ming Cheng, Professor and Chair of Education and Senior Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Hong Kong, on the significance of his essay, Learning and society in a post-industrial era. Marc Tucker: In your essay, Learning and society in a...
By Marc Tucker Elsewhere in this newsletter, we summarize the paper prepared by the OECD for the recent International Teachers Summit in the Netherlands and the remarks made by Andreas Schleicher in his webinar on the subject. These documents are well worth reading, as is Vivien...
By Marc Tucker I just finished reading a recent book from Routledge, Teacher Education Around the World, edited by Linda Darling-Hammond and Ann Lieberman. It is a very rewarding read, full of new information and fresh, insightful analysis. The editors asked an impressive team of researchers...
This is a second version of this article intended to correct an error made in the first version.* By Marc Tucker My apologies to Maimonides. But I would not blame you if you were perplexed about the recent dust-up after the latest PIRLS and TIMSS data came...
I recently 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 mine is established,...