Curios of the week #100

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Oh my! We are a hundred!

For one hundred weeks, I have been compiling a post of all the most interesting education news. I’m not sure if I expected to reach such a milestone—or what I expected—when I began. The success of this column is entirely due to my paid subscribers who make this so worthwhile and for whom I have an apology. For it was this week that I learned you can leave me a note when you subscribe:

I am sorry that I missed them. They are a lovely gift.

This week’s Curios include NAEP results, some interesting reactions, another piece of motivation research and much more.

Sputnik moment of the week

Back in November, Harry Patrinos, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, penned a piece for Real Clear Education wondering whether the United States is due a new ‘Sputnik Moment’. This was the reaction in America in the 1950s to the Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. It prompted some soul searching and a focus on education as a means to maintain the U.S.’s technological prowess.

Patrinos has conducted some interesting research based on international assessments that a core group of countries first began to participate in back in 1964 and has found what may be surprising results.

“We amassed and harmonized the international test scores going back decades and put them into five-year buckets starting in 1970. This allows us to see early rankings and trends over time. Of the 12 countries, Japan was the best performer in 1970 and remained on top by 2015. The United States was 6th in 1970 and climbed to number 4 in 1980 and 1995 and ended up in 5th place in 2015. However, despite the ranking, the US scores increased by 59 points, almost 2/3 of a standard deviation; or, in other words, by two and a half years’ worth of learning equivalent.”

So, it’s not all bad news and perhaps talk by the Trump administration of abolishing the Department of Education, as if it is to blame for a decline in American education, somewhat misses the mark. Nevertheless, Patrinos is open to the idea that the country needs a renewed effort at education reform.

Right on cue, a Sputnik Moment arrived, with China achieving something it was not supposed to achieve. Starved of the most advanced processing chips, it should not have been possible to develop DeepSeek, an Artificial Intelligence application that apparently rivals the abilities of ChatGPT—although don’t ask it about topics such as what happened in 1989 in Tiananmen Square—and at a fraction of the cost of the big American AI companies.

It is not exactly Sputnik in that America did get there first, but it is similar in that it is unexpected and perhaps a blow to the pride of the superpower.

With Sputnik as the precursor, I look forward to it prompting a new era of focus where the best minds work together to solve the problems of delivering high quality education at scale in America and beyond.

State of the week

Feeding into this Sputnik Moment, this week saw the release of generally disappointing NAEP results. These are common standardised reading, writing, maths and science tests sat by a representative sample of students in different U.S. states. This allows for comparisons over time and between the states.