The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools

‘Teachers are kind to those who have good marks’: a study of Japanese young people’s views of fairness and equity in school

“…Interestingly in this study, the experiences of the Japanese students with regard to bullying itself were little different from those reported by the English students. This pattern is in contrast to other recent research which has suggested that Japanese students experience high levels of bullying both from other students and from their teachers (Berliner and Biddle, 1995;Tam and Taki, 2007). And perhaps in this study there was confusion or conflation here in the translation between being hurt and being bullied.…”

Threat Rigidity, School Reform, and How Teachers View Their Work Inside Current Education Policy Contexts

“…These views are often referred to as "the crisis of education." They were ushered in by A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), and they were intensified in recent calls for increased accountability, high-stakes standardized testing, and "teacher-proof" instruction (Berliner & Biddle, 1995;McGuinn, 2006). The thumbnail analysis goes like this: Since the early 1980s, factions in society have concluded that U.S. public education is failing and/or has become a threat-to national security, to individual social mobility, to economic dominance abroad, to performance on various international indicators (such as literacy rates and the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study), and so on.…”

Assessing Barriers to the Reform of U.S. Mathematics Instruction From an International Perspective

“…Second, we recognize that there are many challenges to transplanting effective teaching practices from one country to another (Bempechat, Jimenez, & Boulay, 2002;Bennett, 1987;Berliner & Biddle, 1995;Bracey, 1997;Schmidt, 1996); our results suggest alternative configurations of instruction that could be a useful model for the United States, but we acknowledge that country-specific structural, cultural, and social differences must be considered in any adaptation of cross-national practices (Baker & LeTendre, 2005;Porter & Gamoran, 2002). Third, an emphasis on cognitive strategies is a critical component of teaching, and this is the distinction on which our study focused; however, we acknowledge that there are other important dimensions of "quality" teaching (Stigler & Hiebert, 1997).…”