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The World’s Highest-Scoring Students

How Their Nations Led Them to Excellence

by Hani Morgan (Author)
©2018 Textbook X, 186 Pages
Series: Global Studies in Education, Volume 35

Summary

The World’s Highest-Scoring Students focuses on how various countries transformed their school systems into the world’s leading systems of education. Hani Morgan covers eight countries: Finland, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, Canada, Estonia, and the United States. His book offers ideas on how the United States can improve its school system so that it can regain its status as the world’s undisputed leader in education.
In addition to offering a brief historical context for each country, Morgan describes important practices that helped these nations achieve stellar results in international testing. Some of the subjects covered include teacher preparation programs, cultural attitudes toward education, and teacher recruitment practices. His book differs from other texts on this topic because he describes in detail the most recent practices that various educational systems have used to maintain top academic performance and the strategies others have implemented to climb to the top.
The World’s Highest-Scoring Students offers a new perspective on this topic in several ways. This book provides a balanced view of the highest-ranking nations in education, offering the outstanding practices they use to achieve stellar results but also pointing out the problems they endure. In addition, Morgan discusses various controversies about international tests, including the limitations of using these tests to evaluate students.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction by Thomas V. O’Brien
  • Chapter 1. Why It’s Crucial to Learn from World-Class Nations in Education
  • Chapter 2. Education in Finland: The Closest We Can Get to a Utopian System
  • Chapter 3. From a Third-World to a First-World Nation: Education in Singapore Made It Happen
  • Chapter 4. Japan: Always on Top in Education
  • Chapter 5. High Test Scores Come at a High Price: Education in South Korea
  • Chapter 6. China’s Success in Education: Is This Nation Really That Good?
  • Chapter 7. Learning from Canada: A Top-Performing Country Similar to the United States
  • Chapter 8. Estonia: A New World Leader in International Testing
  • Chapter 9. From Excellence to Mediocrity: The Decline of the Education System in the United States
  • Chapter 10. A Plan for a Better Educational System
  • Index
  • Series index

Hani Morgan

The World’s
Highest-Scoring
Students

How Their Nations Led
Them to Excellence

About the author

HANI MORGAN is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern Mississippi. He received his M.A. and M.Ed. from Teachers College, Columbia University, and his Ed.D. from Rutgers University. He is the co-editor of The World Leaders in Education: Lessons from the Successes and Drawbacks of Their Methods.

About the book

The World’s Highest-Scoring Students focuses on how various countries transformed their school systems into the worldʼs leading systems of education. Hani Morgan covers eight countries: Finland, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, Canada, Estonia, and the United States. His book offers ideas on how the United States can improve its school system so that it can regain its status as the worldʼs undisputed leader in education.

In addition to offering a brief historical context for each country, Morgan describes important practices that helped these nations achieve stellar results in international testing. Some of the subjects covered include teacher preparation programs, cultural attitudes toward education, and teacher recruitment practices. His book differs from other texts on this topic because he describes in detail the most recent practices that various educational systems have used to maintain top academic performance and the strategies others have implemented to climb to the top.

The Worldʼs Highest-Scoring Students offers a new perspective on this topic in several ways. This book provides a balanced view of the highest-ranking nations in education, offering the outstanding practices they use to achieve stellar results but also pointing out the problems they endure. In addition, Morgan discusses various controversies about international tests, including the limitations of using these tests to evaluate students.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Introduction

In 1995, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, two educational researchers with specialties in educational psychology, published The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Although they were psychologists who studied the dynamics of learning in the school setting, their book had very little to do with activities inside the classroom. Instead, the two researchers took a critical look at the public education enterprise in relation to the politics in which it was embedded. Their goals were to defend the system that had come under vicious attack and to change the narrative to reveal the real problems: insufficient resources for the most vulnerable students, ability grouping and tracking, and a very narrow approach to student assessment.

To set up their defense, they made three main points about student achievement: that the alleged test score declines in the 1980s and 1990s were a fiction, that students of the 1990s had outachieved their parents substantially, and that U.S. students stacked up quite well in international assessments. Their final claim was that right-wing operatives had fabricated the education crisis in order to divert attention from the nation’s deepening social problems and to push schools toward market fundamentalism.

Details

Pages
X, 186
Publication Year
2018
ISBN (PDF)
9781433151446
ISBN (ePUB)
9781433151453
ISBN (MOBI)
9781433151460
ISBN (Hardcover)
9781433151422
ISBN (Softcover)
9781433151439
DOI
10.3726/b12911
Language
English
Publication date
2018 (April)
Published
New York, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Vienna, Oxford, Wien, 2018. X, 186 pp., 3 b/w ill., 1 tbl.

Biographical notes

Hani Morgan (Author)

Hani Morgan is Associate Professor of Education at the University of Southern Mississippi. He received his M.A. and M.Ed. from Teachers College, Columbia University, and his Ed.D. from Rutgers University. He is the co-editor of The World Leaders in Education: Lessons from the Successes and Drawbacks of Their Methods.

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