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Continue reading →: Peace Treaty: Why Schools Don’t Change (Even When Everyone Knows They Should)
People love to say “schools resist change.” It sounds like a personality flaw—lazy, stubborn, old-fashioned. But schools aren’t hard to change because educators lack ideas. Schools are hard to change because a school is not just an educational institution. It’s a peace treaty. A school is where a community has…
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Continue reading →: “Screens are hurting learning.” But what is worth learning?
In a recent written testimony to the U.S. Senate, neuroscientist and educator Jared Cooney Horvath warned that children’s cognitive development in many domains has “stalled” and in some areas “reversed,” alongside declines in literacy, numeracy, attention, and higher-order reasoning (Horvath, 2026). In a widely shared clip from that conversation, he…
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Continue reading →: Recent Reports about AI in Schools: What’s Happening and What Should Be Happening?
AI in schools is starting to look less like an “education revolution” and more like a stress test of the old system. When you read the recent reports together, a pretty consistent story shows up: AI isn’t automatically improving learning—because schools are mostly using it to do traditional schooling more…
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Continue reading →: AI Is Not Ruining Schools. It’s Just Doing What Schools Asked.
“The risks of AI in schools outweigh the benefits, report says” is the title of a recent NPR story. The title is dramatic, reassuring, and deeply misleading. It is also a familiar title in the history of technology and education. Whenever, a significant new technology emerged, people wanted to know…
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Continue reading →: Fix the Past or Invent the Future?
Introduction Order the book from ASCD or Amazon. For years, the pervasive story of American education was one of decline. In 1995, educational psychologists David Berliner and Bruce Biddle published a book entitled, The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools (Berliner & Biddle, 1995). This…
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Continue reading →: AI and the Transformation of Learning: My Recent Articles Available Online
AI has become perhaps the most talked about topic in education (actually every field), causing much fear and hope. I have published seven articles on this issue recently and luckily they are all openly available online, thanks to the publishers. The Double-Helix Logic of Curriculum: Reframing Universality and Personalization in…
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Continue reading →: Education Has Failed and What Can We Do Next?
Education has failed to prepare children for the world today. Despite the increased investment, impactful reforms, hardworking teachers and school leaders, countless innovations, and numerous research publications, education has failed. The most basic indicator is that education has not getting better or more equitable, even on the most basic measures.…
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Continue reading →: AI Has Little to Contribute to Traditional Education: Problems and Possibilities
AI is hot today. Almost everyone is talking about AI with all sorts of suggestions, advice, comments, and emotions. The majority of the conversations are about how to integrate AI in traditional classrooms. But given the history of educational technology, it is unlikely that AI can do much in the…
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Continue reading →: Focused: Understanding, Negotiating, and Maximizing Your Influence as a School Leader
INTRODUCTION Focus, focus, and focus! Focus is what this book is about. Here we aim to help school leaders understand what they should focus on and why. We share examples, vignettes, and practical advice to illustrate how to focus without losing sight of the big picture. School leaders often are…
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Continue reading →: What Happened to Global Competence?
About five years ago, all schools embraced the idea of global competence. Governments wanted their students to be globally competent; organizations such as the Asia Society led the development of the content of global competences, and international tests such the PISA even administered an assessment of global competence of 15…
Dr. Yong Zhao is a Foundation Distinguished Professor in the School of Education at the University of Kansas. He previously served as the Presidential Chair, Associate Dean, and Director of the Institute for Global and Online Education in the College of Education, University of Oregon, where he was also a Professor in the Department of Educational Measurement, Policy, and Leadership. Prior to Oregon, Yong Zhao was University Distinguished Professor at the College of Education, Michigan State University, where he also served as the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Technology, executive director of the Confucius Institute, as well as the US-China Center for Research on Educational Excellence. Additionally, he worked as a professor of educational leadership in the Faculty of Education at University of Melbourne and senior researcher at the Mitchell Institute of Victoria University in Australia. He was a visiting Global Professor at University of Bath and a visiting scholar at Warwick University in the UK.
He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education and a fellow of the International Academy of Education.
Yong Zhao has received numerous awards including the Early Career Award from the American Educational Research Association, Outstanding Public Educator from Horace Mann League of USA, Distinguished Achievement Award in Professional Development from the Association of Education Publishers, ACEL Nganakarrawa Award, and AECT 2022 Outstanding Digital Learning Artifact Award and AECT Distinguished Development Award. He has been recognized as one of the most influential education scholars.
His works focus on the implications of globalization and technology on education. He has published over 100 articles and nearly 40 books, including Focused: Understanding, Negotiating, and Maximizing Your Influence as a School Leader (w J. Watterston) (2024), Duck and Cover: Confronting and Correcting Dubious Practices in Education (w R. Ginsberg) (2023), Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao (w G. W. McDiarmid) (2023), Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students in a Rapidly Evolving World (w G. W. McDiarmid) (2022), Learners without Borders (2021), Teaching Students to Become Self-Determined Learners (w M. Wehmeyer) (2021), An Education Crisis Is a Terrible Thing to Waste: How Radical Changes Can Spark Student Excitement and Success (2019) What Works May Hurt: Side Effects in Education (2018), Reach for Greatness: Personalizable Education for All Children (2018), Counting What Counts: Reframing Education Outcomes(2016), Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job: Correcting Top 5 Ed Tech Mistakes (2015), Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon: Why China has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World (2014), Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization (2009)and World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (2012). He has also worked with numerous schools to design new models of education within the existing school.
In about four decades of his professional career, Yong Zhao has led large research projects, directed research and practice centers and institutions, designed schools, curricula, and textbooks, and initiated and led the development of software systems for learning and professional purposes. He has worked with teachers, schools, professional organizations, businesses, and governments in many countries in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, North and South America, and Europe.
Zhao was born in China’s Sichuan Province. He received his B.A. in English Language Education from Sichuan Institute of Foreign Languages in Chongqing, China in 1986. After teaching English in China for six years, he came to Linfield College as a visiting scholar in 1992. He then began his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1993. He received his masters in Education in 1994 and Ph.D. in 1996. He joined the faculty at MSU in 1996 after working as the Language Center Coordinator at Willamette University and a language specialist at Hamilton College.
Learning in the Age of AI 