In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it’s not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions—from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings—should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition brought renewed attention to [...]

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 [...]

David Drew, a professor and former dean at Claremont Graduate University who has studied science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education for decades, recently wrote the book Stem the Tide: Reforming Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Education in America. STEM has been a central focus of education reform by President Barack Obama. The Hechinger Report [...]

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 [...]

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that if it were up to him, he’d double class size and fire the 50 percent of teachers who are in the bottom half of effectiveness ratings:  “doubl[ing] the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students.” Bloomberg, in his inimitable way, breezily [...]

The charter-school movement reached a milestone this week: Charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically privately managed, now educate more than two million students, up from around 1.8 million last year. Despite the heated debate over charter schools, the number is still relatively small considering the size of the K-12 student population in U.S. [...]

PHILADELPHIA—Like many young Americans, Julia Capece went straight from high school to college. Halfway toward her bachelor’s degree, however, Capece decided to move out of her parents’ home. She tried juggling work and school but living on her own and keeping up with tuition and coursework proved too much. Capece finally gave up and dropped [...]

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 [...]