Only far eastern countries such as Singapore and China outperform the Nordic nation in the influential Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. Politicians and education experts from around the world - including the UK - have made pilgrimages to Helsinki in the hope of identifying and replicating the secret of its success.

Virginia pushed into debate of teacher privacy vs. transparency for parents  by Emma Brown and Moriah Balingit in the Washington Post

   A Loudoun County parent has sued state officials to force the release of evaluation data for thousands of teachers across Virginia, making it the latest in a series of states to grapple with whether such information should be made public.

Brian Davison has pressed for the data's release because he thinks parents have a right to know how their children's teachers are performing, information about public employees that exists but has so far been hidden. He also wants to expose what he says is Virginia's broken promise to begin using the data to evaluate how effective the state's teachers are.

Getting Real About Over-Testing  by Dan Weisberg on the Huffington Post site

   If you want a surefire way to dampen the mood at a party or heighten the tension at your dinner table, bring up standardized testing. It's the part of our education system everyone loves to hate. In the last few weeks alone, we've seen stories from across the country spotlighting parents' and teachers' concerns about standardized tests-above all, the worry that students spend too much time every year taking them. It's a legitimate concern. My two kids attend public schools, and I want them to spend as much time as possible learning from amazing teachers-not taking tests.

   Political leaders from U.S. presidents to local school board members promise to turnaround the status quo. Particularly, when the topic is tax-supported, compulsory public education for children and youth ages 6-16 across the U.S. For the past thirty years, civic, business, and philanthropic leaders have targeted U.S. public schools for their mediocrity, as compared to international economic competitors. Calls for "transformation" of school governance, curriculum, organization, and instruction have rolled off the tongues of politicians, CEOs, and superintendents. What policymakers,  practitioners, parents, and researchers too often overlook or ignore is the dual purposes (and paradox) of compulsory public education in a democracy. Tax-supported public schools are expected to conserve and change.

  The fact that the country is aging bodes poorly for public spending on today's youth. That's not just because government commitments to the old, such as Medicare and public pensions, threaten to crowd out funds for other programs. It's also because research suggests that older Americans generally do not support spending on the young. One famous study by MIT economist James Poterba, for example, found that a rise in the share of elderly residents in an area correlated with a significant reduction in per-child educational spending. Disturbingly, Poterba also found that the reduction is especially big when elderly residents and the school-age population are from different racial groups.