Educational Reform In The News
Just like we teach our students, one of the best ways to stay on top of any issue is to read up on it and then discuss it with your peers. That practice doesn’t stop when the diplomas are handed out, and it certainly shouldn’t be curtailed when you’re an educator.
So starting today, and continuing whenever we have a batch of insightful reads to share, we’re going to curate recent news items on our blog that you might find deserve further reading. These blog entries, tagged “In the News,” contain current newspaper features, magazine articles, white papers, studies and findings that we think might be of interest to educators — not to mention members of our own student body and parents.
Our hope is that these brief recaps keep you informed and up to date on the goings-on in the education field.
Here’s our first offering:
Educational reform. A good choice? (From The Economist – Oct. 6, 2014): School vouchers are a divisive subject in America. Proponents claim that vouchers not only grant parents the opportunity to send their children to a private school, but also raise the quality of all education by creating more competition between schools. Critics complain that these subsidies divert necessary resources from public schools, and rarely cover the full cost of a private education. To settle this debate, many have looked to Sweden, where vouchers were introduced in 1992. The results there have been cited as both a case for and against vouchers. So, what has been the actual effect of this Swedish experiment? Read more here.
Fixing the best schools in the world (From Bloomberg Businessweek – Sept. 24, 2014): While some critics dispute the Programme for International Student Assessment rankings — arguing that U.S. schools are evaluated as a national collective, not city-by-city as Chinese schools are — most agree that China produces formidable test takers. The school system in Shanghai, the nation’s largest and wealthiest city, is widely accepted as the most rigorous education system in the world. But Qiu Zhonghai thinks it can do better. Throughout his career he has been pushing the system to improve and adapt alongside China’s fast-changing economy. Today, Qiu is an elder statesman among a growing number of younger, more radical pioneers who think the Chinese education system, for all its success, is archaic and in need of Continue reading…