It’s hard to get excited about President Obama’s push for more states to require school until age 18. I know kids’ life chances improve if they make it through high school. That’s a big deal. But don’t we have an obligation to make school better before we force kids to spend even more time there?
There isn’t much empirical evidence that raising the drop-out age actually reduces drop outs. So this feels a little retro. Kind of like No Child Left Behind: all stick, no carrot. You can hammer on kids (and teachers) all you want; but if you don’t…
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We won’t know for some time exactly what went wrong on the Costa Concordia off the coast of Tuscany a few days ago. But already, the survivor reports contain some clues as to what may have gone wrong with the evacuation.
From the BBC:
“We told the guests everything was OK and under control and we tried to stop them panicking,” cabin steward Deodato Ordona recalled.
It was about an hour before a general emergency was announced, he said.
Then the ship rolled again, now listing to the right, and the captain ordered the ship to be…
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Just seconds after takeoff from DC’s National Airport, Air Florida Flight 90 hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge like a wrecking ball, destroying seven cars, killing four people, and tearing away a section of the bridge wall. The plane broke into a dozen pieces on impact.
The anniversary has me thinking back to the story of one person who happened by the crash site on Jan. 13, 1982. The man who jumped into the river when no one of sound mind would. From the heroism chapter of The Unthinkable:
The snow started out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard…
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An emergency manager I met in Las Vegas recently called my attention to a December Harvard Business Review piece that is worth a look. The article attempts to explain why the employees of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai went to such extraordinary lengths to help protect the guests during the nightmarish 3-day siege of the hotel.
Restaurant and banquet staff rushed people to safe locations such as kitchens and basements. Telephone operators stayed at their posts, alerting guests to lock doors and not step out. Kitchen staff formed human shields to protect guests during evacuation…
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Sometimes it feels like we will never be able to be perfect, like the Finns. Ah, the Finns! In the U.S., our descriptions of the education system are so euphoric that it can be hard to relate.
But I have to say, I didn’t feel that same level of bliss when I was in Finland. I mean, I felt like it was an inspiring place—a lot more civilized in many ways, a place we can learn from. But in real life, it seemed like it was also a complicated place inhabited by…human beings.
It’s important to keep this in…
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A few people have asked me to explain in more detail why I think the PISA index of socioeconomic status is a better way to compare the performance of rich and poor kids around the world (versus the breakdown of scores based on how many kids qualify for free or reduced price lunch at a US school). So I’ll do my best for those of you looking to get deep in the weeds on this….
OK, first let’s talk about the PISA index on socioeconomic status. The data for that index is…
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The other day, I posted the country rankings you never hear about—the only legitimate ones to show how countries’ most privileged 15-year-olds do on the PISA test of what kids know around the world.*
Our richest kids rank No. 7 in reading. OK, so it is not No.1, as others keep insisting, and we spend way more money per student to get there. But I’ll take it. No. 7 is still a perfectly respectable performance—well above the OECD average for rich kids.
But it got me thinking: What about math and science? How did…
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This is the story of how wishes come true in the strange, upside-down world of education.
Edu-pundits like Diane Ravitch like to say that America’s education problems have everything to do with poverty. This is actually a debate that goes back centuries in American schools. It takes different forms at different times, but it almost always follows the same equation: poverty (or race) is a problem so intractable that schools cannot be expected to overcome it. (Fun fact: the same debate was used to defend low-performing, segregated public schools in New York City in the 1960s. Check out this
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