If you are reading this, you know the world didn’t end in 2012. But the world of American education may end in 2014, when the Common Core is scheduled to march into thousands of schools in the United States and end a “chaotic, fragmented, unequal, obsolete, and failing” system that has accompanied the rise of a nation with the largest economy, most scientific discoveries and technological inventions, best universities, and largest collection of Nobel laureates in the world today. In place will be a new world of education where all …

“America’s Woeful Public Schools: TIMSS Sheds Light on the Need for Systemic Reform”[1]
“Competitors Still Beat U.S. in Tests”[2]
“U.S. students continue to trail Asian students in math, reading, science”[3]
These are a few of the thousands of headlines generated by the release of the 2011 TIMSS and PIRLS results today. Although the results are hardly surprising or news worthy, judging from the headlines, we can expect another global wave of handwringing, soul searching, and calls for reform. But before we do, we should ask how meaningful these scores and rankings are.
“Numbers don’t …

(A guest post by Dr. Doug Green at http://www.drdouggreen.com/).

With all of the news about Lance Armstrong, who seems to be the poster boy for performance enhancing drugs (PEDs), I think it’s time to look at how this situation impacts schools. School districts in many districts have been testing high school students for a while to see it they are engaged in the kind of cheating that Lance has been accused of. In some districts the testing goes beyond sports to extra curricular activities. You have to wonder what kind of …

A number of people have asked me about my brief encounter with New York Commissioner John King at the NYSCOSS Fall Leadership Summit on September 24, 2012. Here is my recollection.
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honor to listen to New York Education Commissioner Dr. John B. King, Jr. at the 2012 Fall Leadership Summit New York State Council of School Superintendents(NYSCOSS) in Saratoga Springs. Addressing a standing-room only audience of NY school leaders, Dr. King covered a wide range of topics from the Common Core to APPR …

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 …