Education Week The big clock in Dowan McNair-Lee’s 8th grade classroom is silent, but she can hear the minutes ticking away nonetheless. On this day, like any other, the clock is a constant reminder of how little time she has to prepare her students—for spring tests, and for high school and all that lies beyond [...]

More Americans than ever have earned bachelor’s degrees, putting them ahead of international rivals, but the gap is narrowing, according to new figures from the U.S. Department of Education. The department’s annual Condition of Education report, which tracks all levels of education, finds that the percentage of American 25- to 29-year-olds with at least bachelor’s [...]

Lisa Dieker went around the room asking her middle-school students what they did over the weekend. CJ went to see the movie “Here Comes the Boom” with her boyfriend. Ed played in a basketball game and Kevin posted new dance videos to YouTube. “Did you work on any art projects?” Dieker asked Maria, a girl [...]

Somewhere midway through his sophomore year of college at Florida Atlantic University, Christopher Clevenger started to question his aeronautical engineering major. He liked the coursework, and was doing well at it, but when he thought about his job prospects, the future seemed bleak. “It would be me, a computer screen and a phone,” he said. [...]

ORLANDO―Lee-Anne Spalding’s Elementary School Social Studies class at the University of Central Florida (UCF) had spread out over the room in small groups. One group of sophomore college students huddled over a set of poetry books, picking out ones they liked. Others gathered around the white board as Spalding demonstrated how to they could embed [...]

INGLEWOOD, Calif.—In the back of a tenth-grade geometry classroom on a recent morning at Washington Preparatory High School, nine miles southeast of Los Angeles, Landon Yurica and Alycia Jones bent over the papers in front of them. At 23 and 24, respectively, the two could almost blend in as students as they tried the assignment [...]

NORTHRIDGE, Calif.— It took less than a minute for Mario Martinez to finish the first six questions of the algebra exam that his professor, Ivan Cheng, had just handed to him. The high school-level test was supposed to be a good example of an exam, so that the graduate students in Cheng’s math methods course [...]

NORTHRIDGE, Calif.—On a recent afternoon at California State University, Northridge, Nancy Prosenjak was attempting to quiet the graduate students spread out across conference tables in the back of her classroom. She was still missing nearly a third of the class, but she was eager to debrief with her students about their first day of student [...]

The decision to close more than 50 struggling schools in Chicago has fueled outrage among many parents and teachers. But others see the strategy as a way to improve education for the city’s most vulnerable students. Patricia Hunter, 28, a stay-at-home mom, sends her daughter Danielle to Dulles School of Excellence on the South Side. [...]

The Chicago school system plans to shutter 54 schools next year to save money and improve academics. Among them is Lafayette Elementary in Humboldt Park on the West Side of the city, a school with a treasured school orchestra and a program for autistic children. Valerie Nelson, 43, is a home health care worker who [...]