The Hechinger Report – Tara García Mathewson
“In the United States, schools tend to focus on helping students develop concrete skills, like finding the main idea in a paragraph. Systemwide, there’s not much emphasis on what students read to practice that skill. This isn’t the case in countries with the highest-performing education systems, according to Ashley Berner, deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. In those countries, schools are expected to teach all students common content. They develop similar skills as those that U.S. teachers focus on, but do so using a common curriculum that ensures all students – regardless of class, race or geography – get exposure to a similarly broad set of ideas and facts.” (more)