Chester E. Finn Jr. And Brandon L. Wright of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have recently written a preview article in the Wall Street Journal for their forthcoming book, “Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students.” The article inverts the typical narrative of a focus on equity, and asks if we Read more about The Bright Students Left Behind[…]
On Education Week‘s Top Performers blog, Marc Tucker explores what it takes to achieve dramatic improvement in education systems. Tucker writes: 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 Read more about Dramatic Improvement in Education Systems: What It Takes[…]
About 39 million people ages 16 to 29 across the globe were not employed and were not participating in any kind of education or training in 2013. That’s 5 million more than before the economic crisis of 2008, a new OECD report stresses, and 2014 predictions don’t look much better. In many cases, these young Read more about OECD Report on Youth Unemployment[…]
Marc Tucker of the Top Performers blog for Education Week has a new piece discussing the important research of Australian Geoff Masters. Masters argues that an important way to study the success of education reforms is to take into account which countries have had sustained educational success, with the thought that culture plays a key Read more about Why Is Achievement Rising in Some Countries, Going Down in Others?[…]
For decades now, education researchers have discussed the fact that girls tend to do worse in math (and to a lesser but still significant degree, science) than do boys. As follows, girls also tend to go into math and science related fields less often than do boys. This has been known by researchers for decades, Read more about Gender Gap in Education Cuts both Ways[…]
A new report from the OECD offers a detailed look at 450 education reforms adopted across OECD countries between 2008 and 2014. The (OECD) Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s mission is to “promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.” Of those 450 education reforms, 16 percent Read more about A Global Look at Education Reform[…]
Recently, over 300 dedicated school and district leaders, from across the United States and Spain came together in Washington, D.C. for the Convening of World-Leading Schools. Each attendee represented a school or schools that exhibited impressive leadership by taking the PISA-based OECD Test for Schools to better understand how well they are preparing their students Read more about America Achieves Launches Global Learning Network[…]
An often-cited educational utopia is Finland, but even there, a new study finds, only 58.6% of teachers said they felt properly appreciated. The new study is from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and is entitled the “Teaching and Learning International Survey”. It questioned more than 100,000 lower secondary school teachers and about 6,500 Read more about Teachers feel satisfied yet underappreciated[…]
Nearly 90 percent of lower secondary teachers in the U.S. are happy with their job, but only 34 percent think society values their work. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development‘s Teaching and Learning International Survey features results from the U.S. for the first time. The survey asks educators in 34 countries about various factors Read more about A Global Look at Teaching and Learning[…]
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently released the PISA 2012 Results, entitled Creative Problem Solving: Students’ Skills in Tackling Real-Life Problems. It is the OECD’s first assessment of problem-solving skills and its first attempt to measure the creative skills that today’s economy demands from its workers. Some are surprised to see an Read more about PISA results: American Students as Creative Problem Solvers[…]
Marc Tucker, a long-time proponent of studying high-performing international education systems as a means of improving American education, provided some recent reflection on Shanghai’s students continuing to score highly in PISA, one of the premier means of comparing international student achievement. Marc Tucker explains how Shanghai is able to both produce high quality beginning teachers Read more about Shanghai’s Teacher Development System[…]
EdNext Editor-in-Chief Paul E. Peterson penned a recent op-ed in favor of the Common Core State Standards. Peterson highlighted a curious result of an EdNext survey of Americans, in which only 21% of those surveyed gave American schools an “A” or “B” but 49% of those surveyed gave their own schools an “A” or “B”. Read more about Comparing school success creates impetus for reform[…]
On January 13, 2014, Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave an address to the National Assessment Governing Board Education Summit for Parent Leaders. He highlighted the continual need for American parents to demand more from their children’s schools and teachers so that Americans can be prepared to compete in the demanding global business climate of the Read more about Secretary Duncan: Parent Voices for World-Class Education[…]
Much has been made of the discrepancies between American students and foreign students in terms of their performance on key tests of academic performance. There has also been an ongoing argument between two sides of American education policy about whether the results that show American students falling behind are a condemnation of American education or Read more about U.S. States in a Global Context: Results from the NAEP-TIMSS Linking Study[…]
Back in mid-March, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, hosted the third International Summit on the Teaching Profession. This particular summit focused on teacher quality, including professional standards and teacher appraisal. The past two took place in New York City at the invitation of Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Marc Tucker of the National Center on Education and the Read more about Reflections on the 2013 International Summit on the Teaching Profession[…]
At 69 percent, the United States ranks twenty-eighth in the percentage of four-year-olds in early childhood education, according to Education at a Glance 2012: OECD Indicators, released earlier this month by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The report also finds that the odds of a young person in the United States continuing Read more about Education at a Glance 2012[…]