The wonder drug has been invented, manufactured, packaged, and shipped. Doctors and nurses are being trained to administer the drug properly. Companies and consultants are offering products and services to help with the proper administering of this wonder drug. A national effort is underway to develop tools to monitor the improvement of the patients. The media are flooded with enthusiastic endorsement and euphoric predictions.
This cure-all wonder drug is the Common Core, short for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Cooked up by the National Governors Association and the Council of …

Education has been given the task to turn our children into globally competitive workforce. It is thus no surprise that results of international assessments such as the PISA and TIMSS are closely watched by policy makers and the media as an indication a nation’s education quality and their future competitiveness. While I have serious reservations about making “global competitiveness” as an honorable purpose of education and the reduction of complex phenomenon such as education and human capacity into simplistic numbers, I am unable to resist the seduction of numbers and …

More about the book
I am very pleased to announce that Corwin Press will release my new book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students in association with the National Association of Elementary School Principal (NAESP) next month, June 2012. The book is about preparing global, creative, and entrepreneurial talents. It is my attempt to answer a number of pressing questions facing education today. These questions are exemplified by two new stories that have dominated the media recently, one around the Facebook IPO and the other the debt and jobs …

Betsy, a junior from New Trier high school, interviewed me for a class assignment and sent me her paper. I asked her if I could share it with others on my blog and she gave me the permission. Thanks, Betsy.
“The paper was written for a class called American studies (an integrated history and English course). The assignment was to explore and research a why question – my question was: why has the government tripled state spending on standardized tests? (the answer was my paper),” Betsy provided the background in an …

America has almost caught up with China, and actually in some areas surpassed it. Thanks to No Child Left Behind, America can now claim to have even more frequent high stakes standardized tests than China. It can also be proud to be more serious than China about the test results because it uses test scores to break up schools, fire school leaders, and publicly humiliate teachers, while China does not have the guts to do any of that. China only gives those schools and teachers with high test scoring students …

The Solutions magazine (print version volume 2, issue 2, page 38-43)  published my article about China’s education reform in April. Below is the abstract. The entire article is online at: Reforming Chinese Education.
When Shanghai, China, was awarded the number one spot for educational achievement by the Program for International Student Assessment, a number of Western countries began to ask what had sparked the country’s rise. One answer is five years of education reforms that began with the Chinese government’s recognition that it needs to improve its teaching system as the …

A version of this post is published in Kappa Delta Pi Record, 48(1), p. 17-22 in Feb. 2012.
To build a better education system, America must build on what we have—differentiation, uniqueness, and diversity.
It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.
–Justice Louis D. Brandeis, New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 1932
America is on the precipice of ruining its foundation …

Pass the book, but which one?
To be globally competitive, we should all begin to use chopsticks because chopsticks produce better education outcomes as measured by the international gold standard of education the OECD’s PISA, which tests 15 year olds in math, reading, and sciences, and TIMSS, which assess 9-10 and 13-14 year olds math and science abilities. The top five performers in the 2009 PISA math (Shanghai, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan) all use chopsticks, so do the top five in TIMSS math in 2007 (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, …

Just in case you have not seen this, the Chronicle of Higher Education just published a commentary co-authored by Brian Coppola of University of Michigan and me.
Read the whole article on the site of the Chronicle site: http://chronicle.com/article/US-Education-in-Chinese/130669/
Here are some of the main points:
The education systems in China and the United States not only are headed in opposite directions, but are aiming at exactly what the other system is trying to give up.
In the United States, through programs such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, …

Amanda Ripley recently picked on Diane Ravitch over the issue of how much poverty matters in educational achievement, accusing Ravitch of distorting the reality. By playing with the PISA data, Ripley tries to prove that poverty should not be considered a big problem or excuse for the poor quality of American education. That was what I thought at first, then upon reading more of her writings, I realized that she was trying to prove a bigger point: American education sucks and other countries are great.
Not exactly an earth-shattering or groundbreaking observation from new data or fresh insights. …