New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a recent speech to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that in his ideal world, he’d get rid of half of his city’s teachers and double the salaries of those remaining. This statement, together with a weak economy and teacher layoffs, has led to renewed interest in [...]

DENTON, Texas — One afternoon in mid-November, Jeff Arrington scattered 80 paper gingerbread men labeled with numbers across the floor of his high school disaster-response class. The numbers corresponded with the severity of injuries ranging from burns to hysterical blindness. His students had to categorize the “men” based on the level of medical attention each [...]

In California, the state with the largest population of Hispanic students in the country, the achievement gap starts early—long before children enter school. Hispanic children are much less likely to enroll in preschool than white or black children, and begin kindergarten more than half a year behind their white counterparts. First-generation immigrant students, many who [...]

The extraordinary gulf between science and education was on sharp display this week. The New York Times’ Schools for Tomorrow conference and NBC’s Education Nation took place within a few days of each other, both in New York City. The Times’ conference emphasized the tremendous strides that have been made in educational technology—particularly in online [...]

Republican Party presidential candidates continue to battle it out to see who might face the Democratic Party nominee—most likely, President Barack Obama—in the 2012 race for the White House. As they’ve made known their views about everything from health care and taxes to abortion and gay marriage, education has thus far been overlooked as a [...]

PASADENA. Calif.—Angela Lo grew up in a strict household, under constant pressure to get grades good enough for admission to a top university. But in stark contrast to stereotypes of Asian student success perpetuated in Amy Chua’s new bestseller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Lo put off going to college and instead got a [...]

Richard Lee Colvin, editor of The Hechinger Report, recently spoke with Stephen Smith of American RadioWorks about some of 2010′s most interesting education stories — as well as what to be on the lookout for in 2011. Among the stories from 2010 that Colvin highlighted: the national conversation around the use of value-added data, especially [...]

Misael Rivas is a skinny four-year-old with big eyes and a big personality that sometimes gets him in trouble at his preschool, the Eugenio Maria de Hostos Center in Union City, N.J. His favorite things are fire trucks, table saws, and, despite the occasional call home from his teacher about misbehavior, going to school. So [...]