I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly. Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school [...]

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 [...]

NEW YORK—Republican presidential candidates on Thursday night criticized the Obama administration’s newly announced plan to lower student-loan repayments, saying it would simply shift the burden of costs from students to taxpayers. The plan would limit loan repayments to the equivalent of no more than 10 percent of students’ income for 20 years, with the rest [...]

Can $500 million invested in 20 million of America’s youngest learners help close the achievement gap? That is the aim of the new Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge, the Obama administration’s first competitive grant targeted to improving the quality of early learning programs for children under age 5. While the dollar amount for the [...]

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 [...]

Editor’s Note: With the rise of for-profit colleges and online learning, higher education is at a crossroads. Some experts say America’s colleges and universities are facing a period of “disruptive innovation,” with new ideas and technologies potentially sweeping away established institutions—if they don’t adapt. We asked Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring, authors of The Innovative [...]

The Ford Foundation’s International Fellowships Program (IFP) is winding down after 10 years of providing graduate fellowships to underrepresented students from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The foundation has worked with over 4,300 students from 22 countries, churning out an impressive fellowship completion rate of 98 percent and a graduation rate of 91 percent at [...]

President Barack Obama’s efforts to increase the percentage of Americans with college degrees is running into some of the same stubborn obstacles that have stymied educators, politicians, researchers and philanthropic foundations for years. While a few efforts have succeeded in identifying barriers to graduation, research shows that they have yet to bring widespread improvement. Achieving [...]