Last week I wrote in op-ed in the Yale Daily News in support of Yale's new college at the National University of Singapore. There has been strong disagreement among members of the Yale community over whether Yale should open a campus in Singapore, which has limits on freedom that we in the West strongly disagree with. Here's a portion of my response:
"Singapore is not a liberal democracy, though it is not so different from many Western democracies at earlier stages of development. It is not the caricature one sometimes reads about. Singapore is open to the world, embraces free markets and is routinely ranked as one of the least corrupt countries in the world.
"It has also become more open over the last ten years. In fact, it is to enhance and enrich this process that Singapore has invited Yale to help create a liberal arts college. There will be differences in perspectives among students and faculty, foreigners and locals, but that makes it an ideal place to engage with issues of democracy and liberalism. I can imagine a fascinating seminar on democracy that would be much feistier in Singapore than at Yale precisely because there will be those who take positions quite critical of what is received wisdom in the West. FULL POST
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Editor's note: Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice lead the Independent Task Force on U.S. Education Reform and National Security, sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Klein served as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, where he oversaw a system of more than 1,600 schools with 1.1 million students. He is CEO of the Education Division at News Corp. Rice served as the 66th U.S. secretary of State from 2005-2009. She is a professor at Stanford University (where she also served as provost) and a founding partner of The RiceHadley Group.
The United States is an exceptional nation. As a people, we are not bound by blood, nationality, ethnicity or religion. Instead, we are connected by the core belief that it does not matter where you came from; it matters only where you are going. This belief is what makes our country unique. It is also what makes education critically important, more so today than ever.
While our political leanings may be different, our careers have taught us that education is inextricably linked to the strength of this country and our leadership in the international community.
Today, globalization and the technological sophistication of our economy are widening already troubling socioeconomic disparities, rewarding those who acquire the right skills and punishing brutally those who do not. Much is at stake. FULL POST
Editor's Note: Sir James Dyson is a British industrial designer and founder ofDyson Company. Fareed Zakaria recently interviewed
By James Dyson - Special to CNN
Last week, President Obama granted 10 states freedom from the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The decade-old act holds states to a 2014 deadline to have all students deemed proficient in reading and math.
Even as the standards were enacted, its authors weren’t optimistic. They’d hoped the U.S. Congress would have stepped in to develop a more robust educational measure. The aim of the act was noble: To ensure American students were educated to a level at which they could compete with their global peers. But the method is flawed. Standardization does not inspire.
Two years shy of the deadline, the Obama Administration has given states an out, but not before setting its own benchmarks. To be exempted, states must agree to college- and career-ready standards, set new achievement standards and create new teacher evaluation systems.
The waivers signal a shift in the right direction. But do the new terms simply trade one yardstick for another?
Editor's Note: Dr. James M. Lindsay is a Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter.
By James M. Lindsay, CFR.org
The United States is now moving into the time of year when colleges begin sending out their admissions offers. So what subject should you major in?
(Or in the case of most people reading this post, what should you have majored in?)
No great surprises here. Engineering majors get paid the best coming out of college, and they can expect to earn the highest median mid-career salaries. (Of course, being an engineer requires taking engineering courses. Three cheers for differential equations, anyone?)
Conversely, elementary school teachers can expect to be at the bottom of the salary list in both the near term and the long term.
Editor's Note: Dr. James M. Lindsay is a Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter.
By James M. Lindsay, CFR.org
I have one child in college (Wahoowa!), another set to start this September, and two more who will join them within the next four years. So my ears perked up during Tuesday's State of the Union address when President Obama said that once kids graduate from high school “the most daunting challenge can be the cost of college.”
The president isn’t kidding. As the chart below shows, the tuition and fees that colleges charge have skyrocketed over the past three decades, far more than inflation alone would explain.
If reading charts is not your cup of tea, the following statistic makes the basic point. If you enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1981 as an in-state student, you would have paid $1,146 in tuition and fees for the year. During the current 2011-12 school year, in-state students will pay $11,794 in tuition and fees. If UVA’s tuition and fees had risen in line with the inflation rate, in-state students today would be paying $2,836. FULL POST
This Saturday at 8pm and 11pm ET/PT, Fareed Zakaria's GPS primetime special – “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education” will re-air. So if you missed it in November, make sure you catch it now.
While America was once tops in education, we are now ranked 15th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math.
What happened? How can we dig ourselves out of this deep hole?
For inspiration, we go to South Korea and Finland – two nations that consistently rank highly on education. Interestingly, the two have very different approaches. South Korea has long school days and school years with a strong focus on standardized testing. Finland is much more lackadaisical – except in its approach to teachers and teaching. In Finland, teachers are revered; it’s tougher to get into masters programs for teaching than it is to get into higher education for medicine and law.
So what can we learn? We talked about the priorities of teachers, testing, and technology with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates whose foundation has given $5 billion to education so far; we speak with former DC schools chair Michelle Rhee, and education activist Diane Ravitch. We look at a novel way of teaching, started by a former investment manager who stumbled upon a formula for student success: Sal Khan is the creator of the Khan Academy, a YouTube-based “classroom” that so far has gotten over 80 million hits - and reports of success using it in real classrooms.
Finally, Fareed offers his take on what will fix our troubles.
Here are some excerpts: FULL POST
The GOP presidential candidates sparred Tuesday night on national security, but there was at least one point of agreement among them, or at least between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
“I think that we ought to have an H-1 visa that goes with every graduate degree in math, science and engineering so that people stay here,” said Gingrich.
“I'd staple a green card to the diploma of anybody who's got a degree of math, science, a Masters degree, Ph.D,” said Romney.
The candidates explained that keeping foreign-born students who study science, technology, engineering or math in the U.S. was an important step in creating new technologies, new industries and new jobs.
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a report on foreign-born bachelor’s degree holders living in the U.S. The numbers give some sense of how U.S. universities remain magnets for those seeking to study science, math or engineering. There are now 4.2 million foreign-born science and engineering bachelor's degree holders in the U.S., a number double the population of Houston, Texas, for comparison.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
Those of you who watched our recent education special saw the exhausting study habits of South Korean students. The culmination of that pressure was last week when almost 700,000 South Korean high school students took the test they had spent all those hours working toward.
It was a wild scene outside test centers as younger kids cheered on the heroic test-takers as they arrived. Police motorcycles even whisked the late ones to school.
But when it came time for the high schoolers to begin the grueling nine-hour exam, silence was the order. Planes were grounded, honking was banned and teachers refrained from wearing squeaky shoes for fear of distracting the students. Relatives prayed outside the school gates for good results.
Why all the fuss? Well, it's widely believed in South Korea that this test determines which college a student will go to, which company they will then work at, the size of their eventual paycheck and even whom they will marry. That's pretty intense pressure.
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Editor's Note: Rahilla Zafar is working with a team of writers at Arabic Knowledge @ Wharton on a book highlighting female entrepreneurs and leaders in the MENA region. She is also a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania researching solar and water innovations in developing countries. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Rahilla Zafar.
By Rahilla Zafar – Special to CNN
At 17, inner city high school student Maurice Suggs is attentive and watching him sit through classes, it’s clear he enjoys learning. A student at University City High School in Philadelphia, Suggs is part of a team of a dozen students lead by Wharton Business School Professor Keith Weigelt making history. They are developing a product that currently doesn’t exist, an online business curriculum that will be sold to high schools across the country.
“At school I help put paper in the copier and deliver mail in mailboxes, and imagined myself continuing doing that after I graduated,” says Suggs. His mother is unemployed and his father dropped out of high school and works at a school. After just a few weeks in the course, Suggs now has entrepreneurial ambitions. “Mr. Keith explains good stuff, he talks about products and also tells us how to make money,” says Suggs adding that the class and the opportunity to develop such a product makes him feel happy and inspired. FULL POST
Editor’s Note: Robert J. Hutter is Chairman of Edmodo, which aims to "help educators harness the power of social media to customize the classroom for each and every learner", as well as a Managing Partner of Learn Capital, a venture capital firm concentrating on the global education sector. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Robert J. Hutter.
By Robert J. Hutter - Special to CNN
Technology has long had its supporters and detractors in K-12 education. But until recently, regardless of one’s view, technology has had a minor role to play in the everyday work of K-12 schooling. This is now changing at rapid speed.
Advances in easily portable computing devices and the growing presence of wireless Internet access in schools have quietly worked to create a genuine tipping point that classroom educators are now leveraging to change the very scope of their ability to teach.
Editor's Note: Learn more about the future of education with the special edition of GPS, Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education.
By Fareed Zakaria, CNN
I've been thinking about Occupy Wall Street, which is now occupying a number of other cities in America. What is it really about? The protesters don't like bank bailouts; they feel the 99% have been hard done-by and they're protesting what they see as unprecedented inequality. But America has always had more inequality than many countries.
I think underlying their sense of frustration is despair over a very un-American state of affairs: A loss of social mobility. Americans have so far put up with inequality because they felt they could change their own status. They didn't mind others being rich, as long as they had a path to move up as well. The American Dream is all about social mobility - the sense that anyone can make it.
TIME magazine's Rana Foroohar has a great cover story this week that highlights that social mobility in American is declining. She points out that if you were born in 1970 in the bottom one-fifth of our socio-economic spectrum, you had only a 17% chance of making it into the upper two-fifths. Data show that its much easier to climb the socio-economic ladder in many parts of Europe. Rana points out that while nearly half of American men with fathers in the bottom fifth of the earning curve remain there, only a quarter of Danes and Swedes and only 30% of Britons do. The American dream seems to be thriving in Europe more than it is here at home.
What happened and what can we do?
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This Sunday, a Fareed Zakaria GPS primetime special – “Restoring the American Dream: Fixing Education”. The show airs at 8p and 11p ET/PT.
While America was once tops in education, we are now ranked 15th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math.
What happened? How can we dig ourselves out of this deep hole?
For inspiration, we go to South Korea and Finland – two nations that consistently rank highly on education. Interestingly, the two have very different approaches. South Korea has long school days and school years with a strong focus on standardized testing. Finland is much more lackadaisical – except in its approach to teachers and teaching. In Finland, teachers are revered; it’s tougher to get into masters programs for teaching than it is to get into higher education for medicine and law.
So what can we learn? We talked about the priorities of teachers, testing, and technology with Microsoft chairman Bill Gates whose foundation has given $5 billion to education so far; we speak with former DC schools chair Michelle Rhee, and education activist Diane Ravitch. We look at a novel way of teaching, started by a former investment manager who stumbled upon a formula for student success: Sal Khan is the creator of the Khan Academy, a YouTube-based “classroom” that so far has gotten over 80 million hits - and reports of success using it in real classrooms.
Finally, Fareed offers his take on what will fix our troubles.
Here are some excerpts:
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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