Educational institutions have been among the most active social organisations responding to and facilitating processes associated with globalisation. This has primarily been undertaken through the attempts of schools and universities to 'internationalise' their student intake, staffing, curricula, research, and assessment systems. Amongst the many…

Creativity is the driving force of technological innovation and sustainable economic growth in the knowledge society. A central question, therefore, is how education helps to enhance creativity. As East Asian countries occupy the top of performance tests such as the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), it is most important…

This paper provides new evidence on educational inequality and reviews the literature on the causes and consequences of unequal education. We document large achievement gaps between children from different socio-economic backgrounds, show how patterns of educational inequality vary across countries, time, and generations, and establish a link…

Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, supplanting No Child Left Behind and placing responsibility for public school improvement squarely upon each of the 50 states. With the federal government's role in school accountability sharply diminished, it now falls to state and local governments to take decisive action. Even though most…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

This article presents an overview of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 Problem-Solving assessment. The assessment examined the capabilities of 15-year-olds in 40 nations and four large international cities, as well as the Canadian Provinces, to solve a set…

In the face of global economic recession, the competition and collaboration for innovation and future growth among nations has led to discussions of how young people are being prepared to become the next generation of workers and leaders. Although the U.S. has enjoyed a strong presence among the international community since the turn of the…

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in America's large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class. Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even…

The authors examined the state of United States student academic readiness for higher education from a global perspective utilizing data from the Organization of Economic and Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which tests over a half a million 15 year old student's skills and knowledge.…

This study documents the magnitude of the gaps in student performance for public school students in Pennsylvania and estimates the economic consequences of those education performance gaps. Although Pennsylvania is one of the top-scoring states on the 2013 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) on average, the achievement gaps between…

Explanations for U.S. students' performance on international comparisons of educational achievement abound, with much of the scholarly and public discussion centering on cross-national differences in education systems. The author argues that the connection between economic inequality and educational achievement in affluent societies deserves far…

Stanford education professor Martin Carnoy examines four main critiques of how international test results are used in policymaking. Of particular interest are critiques of the policy analyses published by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Using average PISA scores as a comparative measure of student achievement is misleading…

"Straight A's: Public Education Policy and Progress" is a biweekly newsletter that focuses on education news and events both in Washington, DC and around the country. The following articles are included in this issue: (1) "The High Cost of Low Educational Performance": New OECD Report Finds that 25 Point Increase in PISA Scores…

International educational benchmarks make disappointing reading for Americans, but they also indicate a way forward. PISA results show strong performance is possible. Whether in Japan, Korea, Finland or Canada, many countries display strong overall performance and show socioeconomic background doesn't determine results. Some countries show that…

While much of the work in language testing is concerned with constructing quality tests in order to measure language knowledge in reliable and valid ways, there has been a significant movement in language testing research that examines tests in the context of their use in education and society. This line of research exits from the notion that…