So now we know what does happen in top countries (including some standardized testing in Finland and some union conflict in South Korea), despite what we keep hearing.
What doesn’t happen?
One major difference, about which we hear far too little, is that kids virtually never repeat grades in Finland or South Korea. Now this is counter-intuitive in a way. Isn’t it better to repeat a grade than to promote a student who isn’t ready? Don’t kids benefit from the extra year of schooling?
Not so says a new PISA In Focus Report. High…
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I increasingly hear folks like Randi Weingarten and Diane Ravitch criticize America’s current experiments in education reform as “market-driven” or “corporate.” On some level, I understand what they mean. But on another level, it’s worth considering what kind of assumptions this language implies.
First of all, what makes a reform “market-driven”? Well, Weingarten and Ravitch are usually referring to the increasing use of student test-score growth to evaluate teachers; the dismissal of those teachers who are low-performing; and the opening up of more charter schools. And that’s fair on a superficial level. Education, like health…
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Bloomberg’s Jane Williams interviews Marc Tucker, Linda Darling-Hammond and me about how U.S. schools compare to schools around the world. The link will be up for a little while at least right here.
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If I were shipwrecked on a desert island, you know what I would bring with me? Seriously, I would take all 5 volumes of the latest PISA results to a desert island and just read them. OK, so I would need food, water and an occasional cocktail. But I swear to God, every time I open up one of those reports I find something fascinating. I get distracted for an hour and then go back to what I was doing, wondering what else is in there that I don’t know about.
Consider Table IV.3.10 of Vol. IV. (I…
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A dispatch from my South Korean adventure ran on the Zócalo Public Square web site this week.
The other day, I sat in on a public school class at a high school just outside of Seoul. It was an English class, and the kids were doing comedy sketches as part of their midterm exams. Two by two, they pulled out sunglasses, electric guitars and assorted other props and performed skits they had written in English.
The Korean school system is not famous for fun. But in that classroom at Jeong Bal High School on that…
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At the Aspen Ideas Festival, I had the privilege of talking with three quiet revolutionaries about how to inject games into the classroom. Here is the video of that panel, featuring Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, John Hunter, creator of the World Peace Game, and Katie Salen, executive director of the Institute of Play.
And later that day, I saw the documentary film about John Hunter’s remarkable World Peace Game. I highly recommend it, if you get the chance to check it out. The story of a wise school teacher who turns a…
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In today’s New York Times, Diane Ravitch responds to David Brooks and other critics by hoisting well-worn foreign flags.
“No high-performing nation tests its students every year or uses student test scores to evaluate teacher quality.”
This is a point Ravitch makes again and again. I usually just glide right by it, since it comes wedged between so many other questionable claims and also some valid points. But since I just got back from visiting these high-performing nations, I must note that Ravitch’s version of reality does not match what I saw.
Everywhere I went,…
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Meet the German scientist who is shaping education reform from West Virginia to Tokyo. My profile of Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s education guru, is in the new Atlantic.
As always, there is one missing link—one point that I failed to work into the story. So that’s what a blog is for! The story never ends. So the missing point is this: Schleicher’s conclusions about what makes a great school system do not fall neatly into either the reform or the teachers’ union camp. He is skeptical of performance pay for teachers, for example,…
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