Increasing higher education attainment is becoming a global goal. From the United States to the European Union to China, places around the world are setting goals for how many college and university graduates they want to have.  And as the numbers of students enrolling in higher education are going up, so are the numbers who [...]

Kindergartners in Georgia — many of whom don’t yet read — could soon play an important role in deciding which teachers get raises or get fired. Under a new pilot program, 5-year-olds will be guided through a survey that includes such statements as “My teacher knows a lot about what he or she teaches” and [...]

To earn a teaching license in most states, candidates must pass a handful of exams — largely multiple-choice — that test basic skills and knowledge of specific subjects. Some states also include tests that focus on teaching strategies. One state, Montana, requires no tests at all, just graduation from a teaching program. This pathway to [...]

In America’s push for education reform, the college completion problem is now under the microscope. The Obama Administration’s goal, for instance, is to have 60 percent of young people (aged 25-34) across the country with some postsecondary credential by 2020. But experts say this can’t be reached until another problem is solved; 1.2 million students [...]

Will Ben Austin grow weary of organizing? The 43-year-old lawyer, education reformer, community organizer and father of two has taken on a huge job, mobilizing parents in Los Angeles to help them transform consistently failing schools that he believes are not serving children. In the last three years, as the director of Parent Revolution, Austin [...]

Louisiana became the fourth state in the country to put in place a controversial “parent trigger” law this month, joining California, Mississippi, and Texas. The laws essentially allow parents to force through significant changes in governance or leadership at a struggling school through a majority vote. (Connecticut also has a parent trigger provision in place, [...]

Harvard University announced today that it is joining MIT in offering free online courses—and that the two institutions will together spend $60 million on a project that will grant certificates of completion to those who finish a Harvard or MIT course online. The universities will also make their courses available at no cost to other [...]

So many students will graduate from Slippery Rock University this spring that administrators have had to limit the number of guests each one can invite. There isn’t enough room in the basketball arena for everybody. At a time when American higher education is under fire for dismal graduation rates that have eroded the nation’s leadership [...]

Anthony Kim is the CEO of Education Elements Inc., a California-based for-profit technology company that helps schools shop for and use educational software. He’s a behind-the-scenes leader in the blended-learning movement, where students learn from both computers and teachers. Before founding Education Elements at the end of 2010, Kim started the online virtual school, Provost Systems, which he [...]

The national push to increase the number of Americans with college degrees is enriching at least one key beneficiary: the College Board, the nonprofit organization best known for administering the SAT. Eleven states and the District of Columbia have each agreed to pay the College Board anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to more than [...]

After two years, the federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains an ambitious work in progress, with roughly 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no verdict on its effectiveness. The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, supercharged by a $3 billion windfall [...]

Elliott Elementary in Lincoln, Ne., struck off on its own last year when it became the only school in the city to win money through the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Winning wasn’t something to be proud of, though: It meant the school qualified as one of the worst in the nation. About a [...]

For the casual visitor, it’s easy to miss that Southeast High School in rural Kansas—once among the lowest academic performers in the state—is in the midst of a profound transformation. Like so many other Kansas schools, the building in Cherokee (population: 722) shows the telltale signs of a suffering economy. Bus routes have been cut, [...]

Increasing educational attainment among Latino students—who are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, and who consistently lag behind their white and Asian peers in college completion—is a priority of many advocates and policymakers. Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, has been focused on this issue for decades. She recently spoke [...]

It’s no secret that the growing Latino population in America will have large implications for the U.S. educational landscape over the next generation. By 2020, Latinos are projected to account for 25 percent of the nation’s population aged 18-29. Government officials, policymakers and teachers alike face the challenge of improving the services and support provided [...]

A computer voice guides 12-year-old Amir Accoo to spell the words he hears through his headphones: emergency, bulldozer,  minutes. Accoo spells “minutes” wrong and is asked to try that one again, several times. Later, he clicks on a proofreading button. “You check what you have wrong out of the spelling words I just did,” Accoo [...]

Mississippi is one of 11 states in the nation that doesn’t pay for pre-kindergarten, according to an annual report released today by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Across the country, financial support for pre-kindergarten waned over the last two years as states grappled with budget woes, the report’s authors found. (The Hechinger [...]

Reggie Herndon returned to college because he wanted to change careers. What he didn’t want was another degree. Herndon, a University of Tennessee graduate from Lynchburg, Va., is on his way instead to finishing a nine-month professional certificate in counterintelligence from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pa., which he hopes will bolster his odds of landing [...]