How to Fix Our Education System

We have to compete at quality. The way that’s going to happen is if we have leadership at the top and a real fear through this society that if we don’t compete better by educating our best students—which means getting the best teachers, which means rewarding them for results—we’re going to fall behind.

via How to Fix Our Education System – WSJ.com.

Interesting that the first heading in this story is, “It’s the teachers.”  This is a different take than Friedman (or I) am taking — they’re emphasizing “the best.”

Scratch and more CS Ed in this month’s CACM

The November 2009 Communications of the ACM is a great one for computing education folks.  The cover article is on Scratch (with a hypothetical and cool “Minority Report” inspired interface on the cover).  The editor-in-chief, Moshe Vardi, asks the question, “Is the Image Crisis Over?”  Has the undergraduate enrollment crisis ended?  In the BLOG@CACM section, Ramana Rao talks about how MIT’s computer science curriculum has developed over the years and how that should influence high school CS curriculum.

(Folks, I’m preparing for my trip to Informatics Education Europe this week, and will be at the conference next week, so please excuse a paucity of posts.)