If your child’s teacher seems a little bit on edge this year, it might not be your imagination. Education reforms now going into effect in Indiana, and similar ones sweeping the nation, are targeting something many Americans consider to be strictly off-limits: their paychecks. The laws passed in 2011 and being implemented over the next [...]

Meredith Ballard is an economics major at Colorado College. But when she began her senior year last fall, she started feeling she was spending more time traveling to job interviews than going to class. “It got stressful,” said Ballard, 22, of Green Oaks, Ill. “I had to work on my thesis on top of having [...]

Steve Barr has often found himself in the minority as a charter school founder who supports teacher unionization, albeit of a transformed nature. About 12 percent of charter schools nationally employ unionized teachers, according to recent data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Barr is probably best known for the 2008 takeover of [...]

An unprecedented multibillion-dollar building boom is under way at U.S. universities and colleges—despite budget shortfalls, endowment declines and seemingly stretched resources. Some $11 billion in new facilities have sprung up on American campuses in each of the last two years—more than double what was spent on buildings a decade ago, according to the market-research firm [...]

Although there are lots of ideas these days about how to improve U.S. public schools—a number of which are under renewed scrutiny—Jason Kamras thinks he’s got a simple solution. It’s a radical idea he shares with Warren Buffet and Michelle Rhee, among others: Do away with school choice. No private schools, no homeschooling. He admits [...]

CAWKER CITY, Kan. — Barbara Palen works her way around her classroom at Lakeside Middle School in this tiny farming community (population: 469) some three hours northwest of Topeka. The 14 fourth-graders are starting a new math unit, and Palen wants to know how their parents use measurements. One boy quietly offers that his dad, [...]

INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana is poised to dramatically overhaul the way it determines whether educators are qualified to become principals. Starting in the fall of 2013, Indiana will abandon its mostly multiple-choice test for the administrator license required to become a principal or vice principal. Instead, the new test will feature “real practical, applicable scenarios—case-study kinds of [...]

Low college graduation rates are a hot topic of discussion in America, with frequent mention of the fact that we’re falling behind other countries. As more nontraditional students attend college and the cost of higher education continues to rise, the challenges for those trying to obtain a degree continue to grow. To address these issues, [...]

When Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville raised its price by 59 percent, it landed directly in the crosshairs of the Obama administration. Under a plan proposed by President Barack Obama in his state-of-the-union address in January, universities and colleges like SIUE that increase what they charge students at the fastest rates would forfeit their eligibility [...]

INDIANAPOLIS — Armed with clipboard and pencil, John Somers, an associate professor of teacher education, watches over a group of sixth-graders and two teachers-in-training at an Indianapolis elementary school. “A small concert hall has 98 seats and seven rows,” one aspiring teacher from the University of Indianapolis tells the children. “How many seats are there [...]

Construction cranes sprout from the campus of the University of California at San Diego like towering palm trees in the Southern California sun. There’s a new engineering building under construction, and a new addition to the school of management. A new office building is now open, along with a new parking garage, biomedical research and [...]

INDIANAPOLIS — Any number of educators—principals, personnel directors, superintendents—can be called upon to evaluate teachers. But one school district in Indiana, Anderson, has decided that another group has perhaps the best expertise to judge quality teaching: other teachers. This type of peer review is catching on nationally but is rare in Indiana. That might soon change. [...]

MILWAUKEE — Before he could start student teaching in January at Sennette Middle School in nearby Madison, Andrew Johnson had to pass a multiple-choice test. The 23-year-old wants to teach high-school science, so the exam he took tested his knowledge of biology, chemistry and physics. He had to know the basic properties of an atom [...]

INDIANAPOLIS — Reform: There is perhaps no idea more embraced in education circles nationally—and especially here. Indiana is in the midst of a massive education reform effort that includes the creation of vouchers, increasing the number of charter schools and adopting a new system to hold schools accountable. For the first time, that includes taking control of [...]

Scorned for the abysmally low number of their students who earn degrees, the nation’s community colleges may be about to more than double their graduation rates—not by turning out a single additional graduate, but by changing the way the rates are calculated. The move comes two and a half years after President Barack Obama called [...]

Public-school teacher satisfaction has dropped significantly over the last two years, according to a national survey of hundreds of teachers released today by the insurance giant MetLife. In 2009, nearly 60 percent of teachers polled said they were very satisfied with their jobs, but only 44 percent reported high satisfaction levels in a similar survey [...]

Charter schools have become the fastest growing and most politically popular school-choice option over the last two decades. But a group of researchers hope to draw political attention back to what they have described as “the forgotten choice”: magnet schools. A report last month by UCLA’s Civil Rights Project highlights various strengths of magnet schools, particularly [...]

Add one more point of critique to New York City’s Teacher Data Reports: experts and educators are worried about the bell curve along which the teacher ratings fell out. Like the distribution of teachers by rating across types of schools, the distribution of scores among teachers was essentially built into the “value-added” model that the [...]