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As Americans swoon over Finland's celebrated education system, we often forget about another high achiever just to our North: Canada. Canada scores among the top three countries in PISA assessments of 15-year-olds' reading literacy and science.
What are the reasons for this success? Canadian education leader Dr. Raymond Théberge believes they include Canada's commitment to education equity and its strong support for struggling schools. He also credits the country's general dedication to the health and well-being of its children and families: "We cannot expect the schools to solve all of our society's problems."
We recently spoke with Dr. Théberge, who in 2005 became Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada (CMEC). (In Canada, responsibility for education rests entirely with the thirteen provinces and territories. The CMEC helps provincial education ministries collaborate with one another and the federal government on strategies for improving Canadian schools.)
You can download our entire 17-minute conversation here (a transcript of highlights appears below).
Alternatively, you can listen ...
Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation thought he had a big scoop: "Obama campaign wants to dump NCLB testing, use portfolios instead." He draws his slender evidence for this claim from a comment by Obama spokeswoman Melody Barnes. Barnes mentions the promise of portfolios and "other forms of assessments that may be a little bit more expensive but...are allowing us to make sure children are getting the proper analytic kinds of tools." Petrilli's conclusion: "embracing portfolios is a clear signal of an intention to roll back accountability."
"Not so fast," say Michele McNeil and Alexander Russo. According to Russo, ...
...that has impelled people to respond to our recent interviews with Finnish education official Reijo Laukkanen and PISA assessment authority Andreas Schleicher. Most telephone calls and comments we've received reveal unabashed enthusiasm for Finland's support for teachers, whom Lukkanen and Schleicher credit for Finnish students' success on PISA, one of the most well-known international assessments.
Yet Stanford mathematician James Milgram takes a different tack. In a comment he sent us yesterday, he questions both Finland's preeminence in mathematics and PISA's ability even to detect such high achievement. ...
Imagine a country where no one evaluates teachers, no one evaluates schools, and individual schools' test results remain confidential. You've just imagined Finland, which regularly bests all other developed nations in international assessments of student performance.
How can Finland pull this off without undermining quality? According to Dr. Reijo Laukkanen, a 34-year veteran of Finland's National Board of Education, "We trust our teachers."
In a recent interview with Public School Insights, Laukkanen assured us that this trust is well deserved. Finland draws its teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates, and teaching regularly beats out law or medicine as a top career choice among high performers. "We can trust that [teachers] are competent," Laukkanen told us; "They know what to do." ...
Americans often hear about the United States' lackluster showing in international comparisons of student performance. They hear less about education policies and practices in countries that top the international lists. As it turns out, U.S. education policies--particularly our accountability policies--are often out of step with policies in the most successful nations.
This is one conclusion we draw from our recent discussion with Andreas Schleicher, who heads the OECD's Education Indicators and Analysis Division in Paris. Schleicher oversees the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test often cited in reports about American students' decline in international rankings.
During our interview, Schleicher delivers some familiar bad news: U.S. performance on PISA is below average for the OECD. Socio-economic status has a larger impact on student achievement in the U.S. than in countries that top the PISA rankings. ...
New York City public schools have received a new round of letter grades for their performance, and the results are either encouraging or bewildering, depending on whom you ask. NYC Education Department officials point to the overall improvements over last year, due in large part to the city's rising test scores in mathematics and reading. Critics of the Department point to large fluctuations in grades from one year to the next as evidence that the grading system is fundamentally flawed. ...
Last Sunday the Dallas Morning news published a disquieting article about students' results on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). Here are a few excerpts:
Students are passing the ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade language arts TAKS at higher rates than ever. Some even post near-perfect passing rates.
But on the short-response portion, fewer than half of North Texas students pass.
...
Testing experts say exams should include sections that expose such academic cracks.
But rarely do Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests ask students to do more than fill in a bubble.
...
The past month has witnessed many skirmishes over the reliability of rising state test scores as measures of some high-profile education reforms' success. At issue are: ...
A few weeks ago, we were excited to learn that Crook County Middle School's Michael Geisen, a forester-turned-science teacher, was named by the Council of Chief State School Officers as the 2008 National Teacher of the Year. Selected for an innovative teaching approach that focuses on the individual needs of students, school/community connections, and collaboration with his colleagues, Geisen is now spending a year traveling nationally and internationally as a spokesperson for education.
He recently spoke with Public School Insights about a variety of topics including what he hopes to achieve as teacher of the year, his belief in the need to redefine "basic skills" and "intelligence," the support teachers receive (or should receive), and how he personalizes teaching to foster a life-long love of learning while increasing standardized test scores.
Listen to 5 minutes of highlights from our interview (or read through the transcript below): ...
The NEA has just released a major new paper on the federal role in education entitled Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020.
In doing so, they join a number of other groups that have deemed it high time to clarify the federal role after seven years of NCLB--and before a new administration arrives in January. (See, for example, the recent report by the Forum for Education and Democracy and the even more recent statement released by a distiguished task force calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.")
NEA's report begins with the premise that NCLB has thrown the federal role out of whack, creating "top-down, command-and-control, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates" that have narrowed curricula, robbed assessment of its power as an instructional tool and failed to close achievement gaps.
With the aim of ensuring universal access to great public schools by 2020, the NEA document outlines six priorities for federal involvement in education: ...
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