Daily News Roundup, March 10, 2010

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Some of the News Fit to Print

COMMON STANDARDS ELICIT KUDOS, CRITICISM
The first public draft of grade-by-grade common standards, released this morning, is being greeted with a mix of praise and skepticism, illustrating both the mounting consensus that the country needs to set higher expectations for all students and the many problems that complicate their adoption. An earlier standards document, released last fall, outlined a set of “college and career readiness” skills that students should master by graduation. The document released Wednesday, from the same common-standards initiative, completes the picture by specifying the competencies students must have in each grade if they are to reach those goals. Merged now into one draft, the standards represent a sweeping—and controversial—attempt to describe the skills and knowledge every American student should have in English/language arts and mathematics to thrive in college or careers. The article is in Education Week.

MANY NATIONS PASSING U.S. IN EDUCATION, EXPERTS SAY
One of the world’s foremost experts on comparing national school systems told lawmakers on Tuesday that many other countries were surpassing the United States in educational attainment, including Canada, where he said 15-year-old students were, on average, more than one school year ahead of American 15-year-olds.  America’s education advantage, unrivaled in the years after World War II, is eroding quickly as a greater proportion of students in more and more countries graduate from high school and college and score higher on achievement tests than students in the United States, said Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world’s richest countries.  “Among O.E.C.D. countries, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey and Mexico now have lower high school completion rates than the U.S.,” Mr. Schleicher said. About 7 in 10 American students get a high school diploma.  The article is in The New York Times.

A HIGHER EDUCATION MODEL FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
Elisa Stephens blogs in the Huffington Post: Historically, one of the keys to America's economic success has been the competitive educational advantage our country enjoyed over the rest of the world. This historic educational competitive advantage no longer exists. And in a world where brains will mean more than brawn when it comes to the jobs of the 21st Century, we need to regain this competitive advantage.

LESSONS AMERICA CAN LEARN FROM ASIA ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION
Kishore Mahbubani writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Unquestionably the great American universities—for example, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale—stand heads and shoulders above the competition around the world. Yet their enrollment makes up only a fraction of total higher-education enrollment in the United States. And while many American universities have been standing still, their Asian counterparts have surged ahead. With more than 20 million students, China has, since 2005, overtaken America as the world's largest higher-education sector. The time has come for American higher education to think the unthinkable: that it can learn lessons from Asia.

EMPLOYERS WANT 18TH CENTURY SKILLS
A survey conducted by Hart Research Associates on behalf of the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that "Employers believe that colleges can best prepare graduates for long-term career success by helping them develop both a broad range of skills and knowledge and in-depth skills and knowledge in a specific field or major." Note the general knowledge request. Finally, when it came time to identify the most common skill or knowledge cited by employers as needed in the post-downturn, globalized, 21st-century universe, what came up first was a basic, longstanding skill: "The ability to effectively communicate orally and in writing." Eighty-nine percent of employers highlighted it; "critical thinking" and "analytical reasoning" came in second at 81 percent. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.