U.S. school excuses challenged - Class Struggle - The Washington Post: Many Americans, including me, are skeptical of efforts to portray our public schools as failures compared to the rest of the world. The late Gerald W. Bracey, my favorite contrarian education expert, exposed exaggerations, false assumptions and deceptive graphics that made us look worse than we were.
But a new book edited by Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, offers convincing evidence that we are running out of excuses. The book, “Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems,” is so unsettling I am devoting two columns to it. Today I examine apparent flaws in our rejection of international comparisons. Thursday I outline what Tucker says we must do to catch the Shanghainese, Japanese, Finnish and other top-performing education systems.
