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Continue reading →: Test Scores vs. Entrepreneurship: PISA, TIMSS, and Confidence
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.…
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Continue reading →: My new book: World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students
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…
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Continue reading →: Follow the Money: A High School Student’s Take on Standardized Testing
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…
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Continue reading →: What’s Still Missing in American Education and How to Out-educate China?
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…
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Continue reading →: My article in Solutions magazine: Reforming Chinese Education: What China Is Trying to Learn from America
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…
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Continue reading →: Mass Localism for Improving America’s Education
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…
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Continue reading →: Pass the book, but which one?
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…
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Continue reading →: U.S. Education in Chinese Lock Step? Bad Move. Chronicle of Higher Ed Commentary (B. Coppola & Y. Zhao)
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…
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Continue reading →: The Difference between a $10,000 Education and a $10 Education
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…
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Continue reading →: The Grass Is Greener: Learning from Other Countries
(A version of this post is published in Teachers College Record under Handan Xuebu: What We Can and Should Learn from Other Countries) In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their…












