By Marc Tucker I just finished reading a recent book from Routledge, Teacher Education Around the World, edited by Linda Darling-Hammond and Ann Lieberman.  It is a very rewarding read, full of new information and fresh, insightful analysis.  The editors asked an impressive team of re

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

I recently returned from a week in Australia and another in Singapore, and found much food for thought in both. Mining is by far Australia’s biggest industry. But that does not mean that it is Australia’s biggest employer. I learned that once a mine is established, most of the mining

An interview with Sharon Lynn Kagan, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Early Childhood and Family Policy, Co-Director of the National Center for Children and Families and, Associate Dean for Policy at Teachers College, Columbia University and Professor Adjunct at Yale University’

I wonder whether educators over the millennia have focused as this generation has on the nature of the skills that would be demanded in the next century.  Maybe not.  The idea of progress is pretty recent, after all.  For most of human history, people thought the future would be much

My colleagues Vivien Stewart, Betsy Brown Ruzzi and I returned from another visit to Singapore a few weeks ago, 23 years after my first visit.  Each visit is dazzling.  None has yet disappointed.  In a way, a visit to Singapore is like benchmarking the rest of the world through this o

Vivien Stewart is a mistress of deception.  In A World-Class Education: Learning from International Models of Excellence and Innovation, she distills a lifetime of astute observation into a slim volume so skillfully written—so easy to read—that the reader is hardly aware of the subtle

Twenty-seven years ago, I had the privilege of serving as staff director and report author for the Carnegie Task Force on Teaching as a Profession.  We released our report, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century, in the spring of 1986.  The message of the report was clear en

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

Shortly after the results of the first administration of what was then called the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, a colleague of mine and I visited Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong to see if we could understand what it was that these two countries and one large city h