This is funny. From Scholastic Administrator story on Finland:
“One anecdote that truly illuminates the difference between U.S. and Finnish culture came when visitors asked librarians how they filter the Internet for students. Finnish educators didn’t understand the question, Walker says, because the concept was so foreign to them. Finally, the two responses the group got were, ‘Students know these computers are for learning,’ and ‘The filters are in students’ heads.’”
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I’ve been reading Richard Ford’s novel Canada, told from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy whose parents—unexpectedly, disastrously—rob a bank in 1960 in North Dakota. Damn, this is some fine writing.
One paragraph in particular encapsulates what separates human beings who recover from trauma and those who do not. It is almost a trick of the imagination, a kind of elegant delusion that changes everything. The boy and his sister have just visited their parents in jail, for what would be the first and last time. They are alone and abandoned in the world, and yet the boy makes…
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I’ll be giving a talk about The Unthinkable at the 9/11 Tribute Center in Manhattan on May 14 at 6:30 pm. It’s been 12 years since I began interviewing disaster survivors all over the world, starting in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. I am honored to be returning to this complicated place carrying a message of hope. Please join me if you can make it.
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Marc Tucker explains why Americans are so burnt-out on tests that they might cannibalize the Common Core—the best thing to happen in American education in a long while.
“American teachers’ experience of testing is very different from that of their counterparts in the top-performing countries. They see cheap tests, unrelated to what they teach and incapable of measuring the things they really care about, being used to determine their fate and that of their students. What is ironic about this is that, because these other countries do much less accountability testing than we do, they can afford…
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American students, teachers and parents are sick of tests and rightly so. For years, they’ve been bombarded with ridiculous, dumbed-down tests that waste class time and demoralize everyone.
Now some are taking their rage out on the Common Core, a new set of voluntary, rigorous standards designed by educators around the country.
That is a mistake, understandable as it may be. And it’s one that could grow into a tragedy over the next year if things continue as they are.
Here’s what we know for sure: The U.S. urgently needs more…
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I’ll be in San Francisco on Wednesday for the NewSchools annual summit. That afternoon, I’ll be hosting a discussion about what America can learn from the best education systems in the world.
The panel features Sir Michael Barber (formerly of McKinsey and UK P.M. Blair’s administration, now at Pearson), Jon Schnur (former education adviser to Presidents Obama and Clinton, now at America Achieves) and Joanne Weiss (formerly head of Race to the Top and now Chief of Staff to Ed Sec Arne Duncan). All of these people have visited schools around the world and spent…
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Sometimes when I tell Americans I am working on a book about the smartest countries in the world, they assume I mean China.
I don’t mean China. And I won’t, not anytime soon.
It’s true that teenagers in Shanghai, a huge, booming city in China, trounced teenagers on every continent on an international test of critical thinking in math, reading and science in 2009. Their performance was remarkable. Truly. In math, their poorest kids outperformed our richest kids.
But concluding anything about China from Shanghai’s results is like using test scores from Minneapolis to make assumptions about Detroit; one…
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During my recent obsession with tracking kids’ boredom on Twitter, I’ve naturally been wondering which country has the most bored kids.
Of course, this is hard to find out—for about a thousand reasons, most of which are boring. But the closest thing I’ve seen to an imperfect answer comes from the OECD’s 2002 Education at a Glance report. The survey asked 15-year-olds around the world if they “often felt bored” at school. It’s worth noting that “often” and “bored” are words with very different definitions depending on the culture you live in…but let’s…
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