March 2012

Will cheating scandals change the focus on high-stakes testing?

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has another explosive story out this week about possible cheating on standardized tests. This time, the newspaper looked at suspicious circumstances in nearly 70,000 schools across the country and found “red flags” in about 200 districts, an analysis that “suggests a broad betrayal of schoolchildren across the nation,” the newspaper said.  The […]

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Little teacher support for some Obama school-reform strategies

Teachers are skeptical about several of the major reform ideas the Obama administration and education activists are pushing to turn around the nation’s struggling schools, a new survey commissioned by Scholastic and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has found. (Disclosure: the Gates Foundation is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Fewer than a […]

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As India expands higher education, questions remain about quality and competition

Will India’s higher-education system catch up to those of world leaders, and should its economic rivals be concerned? American RadioWorks aired a podcast today that addresses these and other questions about India’s education ambitions. I discussed India’s higher education building boom with host Stephen Smith, and how the country’s open universities fit into plans to expand access […]

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