CHICAGO – On a recent Friday morning, 15-year-old Jerod Franklin stared at his hands as he labored to type up memories of the first time he grilled steak. Next to him, classmate Brittany Levy tackled a piece about a trip to the hospital. The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute ninth-graders were working on writing assignments in the [...]

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 [...]

KENT, Ohio—As finals approached, nearly 240 students in a computer lab worked through basic algebra problems at Kent State University, where they and more than 3,200 of their classmates had been deemed unprepared for college-level math. They struggled to solve for x in equations like 3x + 1 = 7—a skill students are meant to [...]

New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is at risk of losing a $190 million grant, after the federal government included it on a list of 132 substandard Head Start agencies across the country this week. Head Start is the half-century-old federal preschool program for low-income children. ACS, among the oldest and largest Head [...]

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 [...]

Despite political pressure to improve graduation rates, few states have done anything serious to increase the low proportions of community-college students who actually earn degrees, according to a survey released today. In the survey of community-college officials from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, by the University of Alabama Education Policy Center, two-thirds [...]

States seeking waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act are hoping to replace what is widely considered an outdated, but consistent, school accountability regime with a hodgepodge of complex school grading systems that are as diverse as the states themselves.

Sandy Baum, an independent policy analyst for the College Board, discovered recently that colleges and universities awarded $5.3 billion in grants beyond the demonstrated financial need of students and their families this year. Her analysis included state-supported public universities, which in some cases gave more than half of their aid to students who federal formulas [...]