The benefit of a big conference like SXSWEdu is a sort of ambient exposure to trends. Here are five concepts that everyone (or at least key, smart people) were talking about at last week’s conference, and that bear keeping an eye on for the future. 1) ConnectED . Companies including Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, […]

Monroe Middle School teacher Dawn Norris hears a difference in her language arts classes since she starting using Common Core standards two years ago. It’s how the 13-year teacher knows the new standards are working.

The sticker price at Pennsylvania State University runs about $30,000 a year for in-state students. At Swarthmore College, it’s nearly twice that. Yet Swarthmore ends up being cheaper for most students. That’s because this private liberal-arts college near Philadelphia offers many families a hefty discount, bringing down the average cost to even less than taxpayer-subsidized […]

America’s colleges and universities are quietly shifting the burden of their big tuition increases onto low-income students, while many higher-income families are seeing their college costs rise more slowly, or even fall, an analysis of federal data shows. It’s a trend financial-aid experts and some university administrators worry will further widen the gap between the […]

I tend to think of US teachers being relatively poorly compensated in our society, especially when compared to say, private equity fund managers. And I always thought that many developed nations paid their teachers far more than we do in the United States. So I was surprised to see that U.S. public school teachers are […]

The quality of teacher training will be crucial to the success of the new Common Core State Standards in math, educators say, and the pressure is on districts to give elementary school teachers the skills they’ll need to provide students with a firm foundation in early arithmetic.

Austin, TX. — When Erynn Petersen, a technology educator and advocate, wanted to prepare kids in rural parts of Washington state for technology and engineering jobs, she realized she needed to appeal to her audience. Compared to students in urban areas, many of the rural students she met had little access to technology, and no experience […]

One of the knocks on community colleges is that many students who might have succeeded in completing a four-year college degree are unable to weather the college transfer process. They get their associate’s degree, but not their bachelor’s. Indeed, back in 2009, Bridget Terry Long and Michal Kurlaender found hard evidence that starting at a […]

The White House, the College Board, Bank of America, and Comcast. What do they have in common? They’ve all announced partnerships with Khan Academy, the nonprofit provider of free educational videos and analytics tools, in the last 12 months. These partnerships combine various aspects of cash, content, and distribution. But in each case, the stodgier […]

The big news coming out of SXSWEdu Wednesday was the New SAT. It even has a hashtag: #NewSAT. The changes to the test taken by millions of students each year, which will start in 2016 with today’s 9th graders, are, at first glance, puzzling. The vocabulary section will be simplified, with fewer “gotcha” words. The […]