By Emily Kingsland Earlier this month, the Center for International Education Benchmarking introduced a new feature on its web site.  The Study Guide is intended to provide readers with a weekly summary of headlines from the top-performing education systems in the world.  This month’s

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

By Emily Wicken In December, the results of the 2011 administration of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) were published in three separate reports, each examining international performance in r

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has produced a new education league table of the best international education systems for Pearson, which is published in a new report titled The Learning Curve: Lessons in Country Performance in Education. The rankings take into account additional

Recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF) released their 2012-2013 Global Competitiveness Report.  In this report, the WEF ranks 144 countries based on a global competitiveness index; their definition of competitiveness encompasses “the set of institutions, policies, and factors that d

The new report, Starting well, by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and the Lien Foundation profiled in our Global Perspectives section this month urges the importance of having strong early childhood education systems in place in order to ensure future success in school.  The OEC

Following the release in late 2010 of the PISA 2009 results, the Australian government, unhappy with how the nation stacked up against other high performing countries in Asia and Europe, commissioned a report to determine what changes, if any, were necessary in how schools in Australi

In their recent report published in February of this year, the Grattan Institute examined the school systems of several East Asian countries with a view towards drawing policy recommendations from what they learned for Australia. In the report, titled Catching Up: Learning from the be

What guarantees a high-quality teaching force?  We have examined this question from several angles in this issue, with Marc Tucker’s reflections on the second International Summit on the Teaching Profession, our review of the World Bank SABER findings on teacher policies in top-perfor

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