Just as the Internet has made news free and music cheap, it may be about to vastly lower the cost of one of the most expensive commodities in America: college. Several new companies and organizations with impressive pedigrees are harnessing the Internet to provide college courses for free, or for next to nothing. And while [...]

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 [...]

TOKYO—While on assignment in Japan recently, Blaine Harden sat down with Yujiro Hayashi, president of the Institute of National Colleges of Technology (Kosen), to talk about what the United States can learn from the Kosen system, why technical education is essential, what the future holds—and more. Q: What are Kosen Colleges of Technology doing right, [...]

HACHIOJI, Japan – When he was 14 and living at home, no electronic device was safe from Soichiro Tsunakawa. He took apart cassette recorders, stereo speakers and all of his family’s mobile phones. He swears that when he put them back together, they always worked. The Sony Corporation apparently believes him. The seventh-year student here [...]

The Department of Education released its long-anticipated regulations for for-profit colleges Thursday. By 2015, if fewer than 35 percent of graduates of a school are repaying the principal on their loans three years after commencement and if loan payments are more than 30 percent of discretionary income and 12 percent of all earnings, the school [...]

On a recent spring morning at the St. Elizabeth’s Head Start center in North Philadelphia, Ashley Post, a first-year teacher freshly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, clicked on her “listening ears” and patted down her “thinking cap” as a room full of 15 preschoolers imitated her every move. Many of the children were here [...]

BOSTON— Across the U.S., thousands of workers stuck in low-paying jobs are trying to get a leg up through free basic-skills classes that train them in everything from elementary math to basic literacy. Mya Maw, a 52-year-old Burmese immigrant, longs for a stable office job in Boston, where she’s raising twin teenage daughters and washing [...]

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 [...]