Mike Daisey is a man damned -- or so the blogosphere, journos and pundits the world over would have us believe. He conflated fact and fiction, and he lied to both the producer and the host of "This American Life" in a radio show they aired in January 2012.

But...

America's universities have long had a reputation for being the best in the world -- a truth so apparently self-evident that it's rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation's 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers?

Indeed, there's...

"It takes a lot to be a teacher," Luke Carman says. "Every decision that is being made, you're simultaneously doing 17,000 other things. It requires a lot of intellectual forethought, persistence and energy."

Carman, 23, has spent the past two years preparing for a career in the classroom through the...

"All good bosses are alike; each bad boss is bad in his own way."

Tolstoy this isn't. Nonetheless, it serves reasonably well as a distillation of recent research on leadership. Good bosses tend to do a lot of the same things: trust, respect, protect and empower their underlings; treat people...

I recently had a chance to ask the OECD's Andreas Schleicher, an expert on educational systems around the world, what he makes of the current push for reform in American public education.

Q: The PISA results make clear that U.S. students aren't performing particularly well compared...

In a few weeks, Mopati Morake will earn a bachelor's degree in political science from Williams College in Massachusetts. A native of Botswana, Morake has been educated on three continents. He finished high school in 2007 at Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong.

On March 16, I sat down with Finland's Minister of Education, Ms. Henna Virkkunen, for a discussion of the Finnish educational system -- and what lessons it might hold for the U.S. educational system.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Hechinger Report: It's...

An editorial on March 7 in The New York Times, titled "Fairness in Firing Teachers," has me wondering whether the Times editors understand much about how teachers -- in New York City and elsewhere -- are evaluated. The editorial makes some stunning statements that simply don't comport with...

They command six-figure salaries, often with annual bonuses and car allowances. (Generous health care and pension plans are a given.) Sometimes their employers also foot the bill for their life insurance policies.

There are very few of them, for their skill set is rare. They must be savvy politicians and...

Among the countless catchphrases that educators generally despise are "drill-'n-kill" and "rote memorization." In keeping with their meanings, both sound terrifically unpleasant. To learn something "by rote," according to the Random House dictionary, is to learn it "from memory, without thought of the meaning; in a mechanical way."

The fear...

On Monday, January 10, Justice Cynthia Kern ruled that the decision by the NYC Department of Education to publicly release Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) with individual teachers' names attached was not "arbitrary and capricious." That the chips fell this way isn't terribly surprising.

Kern's ruling is interesting more...

Oops, Rick Hess has done it again: challenged conventional wisdom and shown how fuzzy much of today's education-reform thinking is. In his latest book, The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday's Ideas (Harvard University Press, 2010), Hess drives home the...

The world wasn't exactly shocked in 2009 when Alex Rodriguez's name turned up on a list of 104 Major League Baseball players who had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.

Nor was anyone surprised to learn later that year that David Ortiz -- the Red Sox's "Big Papi" and a six-time...

Last week, Finland was once again among the top-scoring nations on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam given to 15-year-olds around the world. U.S. students were in the middle of the pack for science and literacy but below average in mathematics.

To gain insight into...

Holiday season is once again upon us. It's a time of thanksgiving, and joy, and renewal -- and believing, or pretending to believe, that it's better to give than get.

To see loved ones far away, many will take to the skies and endure endless hours of discomfort in seats...

It's hard to read Henry David Thoreau these days -- almost 150 years after his death -- and not think, "How quaint! How clichéd!"

It's equally hard to remember that Thoreau's insights weren't considered clichés when he wrote...

In a segment called "Waiting for Superman: Fact or Fiction?" on the BAM! Radio Network, education historian Diane Ravitch and four members of the media (including yours truly) discussed Davis Guggenheim's latest documentary, Waiting for 'Superman'.

Our host, Errol St. Clair Smith, wanted to...

One surefire way to get people's attention is to say the exact opposite of what everyone else is saying -- to claim that conventional wisdom is wrong.

And sometimes, of course, conventional wisdom is wrong. This was one of the themes of Freakonomics, the hugely popular book by Stephen Dubner...

Can failure transform us in important -- and healthy -- ways? Should we champion failure as much as we do success? Is failure really just success by another name?

And in the field of education, should we learn not just to live with but to love leaders who fail?

Such...