Welcome to Top of the Class, our new monthly e-newsletter, and also to our new web site. Both are intended to provide you with a gateway into a world that appears to be of great interest to a growing number of educators and policy makers everywhere, a world defined by the accomplishme

By Roland Østerlund, former director general of the Ministry of Education, Denmark On the shelf with literature on education there is a wealth of books and articles on higher education issues but little on the possibilities for the large group of young people who do not opt for an aca

In 2008, Australia’s six states and two territories agreed to develop common literacy and numeracy assessments aligned with a national curriculum in these subjects. Top of Class reached out to Barry McGaw, Chair of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA)

Recent Conferences of Note The Role of Benchmarking in Global Education: Who Succeeds at PISA and Why? Dec. 2-3, 2011, Albany, New York This conference was hosted by the Institute of Global Education Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Administration and Policy Studies at

In every newsletter, we will highlight a particular set of international education statistics.  In this newsletter, we focus on the most recent OECD statistics relating reading ability to students’ socioeconomic background and the socioeconomic background of the other students in the

New Announcements On January 19, 2012, the National Center on Education and the Economy launched the Center on International Education Benchmarking (CIEB). The new Center will conduct research on the world’s most successful education systems.  It will also offer access to information,