By Betsy Brown Ruzzi Backtracking from a proposal to do away with the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), the set of examinations that English secondary students take from age 16 on, Education Minister Michael Gove announced February 7 that the government would not esta

This is a second version of this article intended to correct an error made in the first version.* By Marc Tucker My apologies to Maimonides.  But I would not blame you if you were perplexed about the recent dust-up after the latest PIRLS and TIMSS data came out.  Some of the best-know

On a recent trip to England, CIEB Director Betsy Brown Ruzzi talked with Matt Sanders, lead education policy advisor in Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s office, to discuss the recent changes to the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) that the government launched in mid

Vivien Stewart, Senior Advisor for Education at Asia Society and CIEB International Advisory Board Member, reports on the proceedings of the inaugural meeting of the Global Cities Education Network, held in Hong Kong. The 21st century will be the century of cities, according to some o

In his introduction to the most recent edition of the OECD’s yearly compendium of international education statistics, OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría points out that this is the first edition that includes data on the world’s education systems since the “full onset of the global r

I left the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession not at all sure of what I had learned.  But, after a few days to sort it out, there is quite a lot.  Here it goes — 1.    Swiftly broadening goals I was struck by the way many of the top-performing countries talked abou

The relationship between socio-economic status and performance is complex.  It has been tackled by education researchers over the years in an attempt to explain why some countries are more able than others to moderate the impact that socio-economic status can have on a student’s schoo

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)