Correcting mistakes may be an essential part of a good education, but that doesn’t apply inside the branch of the U.S. government that compiles and keeps education statistics. Indeed, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) knowingly leaves in errors that are discovered two to three years later. And then this error-ridden data is used [...]

Yet another study seems to indicate that white and Asian middle-class families benefit more than minority and lower-class families from open enrollment programs where students can choose to go to public schools outside of their neighborhoods. The latest finding comes from a data analysis of New York City’s school choice program conducted by The Research [...]

Online learning has been trumpeted by everyone from academics to politicians to venture capitalists as a way to improve access to education. But now a novel idea is emerging from a prominent group of digital education supporters: you can’t learn everything online. The Minerva Project is a first-of-its-kind hybrid of old and new in which [...]

At the end of March, the Hoboken school board voted to increase taxes by 4 percent to pay for the school budget, which spends $23,716 per student, the second highest in the state of New Jersey. It struck me how much school spending has changed since I went to school, when wealthier districts consistently spent [...]

A new national database of personal student information understandably has parents and privacy advocates alarmed. As reported elsewhere, the new inBloom database houses information on millions of school children from nine states and includes names, addresses, telephone numbers, disciplinary records and learning disabilities. One of the states is New York. Naturally, the mommy listservs in [...]

There’s been a surge in the number of high schoolers taking college classes, and it’s not the nerdy bright kids anymore. That’s the takeaway from some new data tables published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) that were publicly released in March, but dated February 2013. The new data report that about 1.3 [...]

The fetishization of data has hit both education and journalism. And that’s why I’m starting this datablog. My aims are many. I plan to list and summarize which data sets and studies are available on certain education topics as a resource for journalists and other lay people. I’d like to write about interesting people who [...]

At a recent event, a bigwig at McGraw-Hill, the textbook publisher, urged the audience to take an online course so that we’d have a sense of the future. As a journalist who covers online education, I was embarrassed not to be enrolled in one. So, a couple weeks ago, when a dear friend in DC [...]

Digital learning is one of those trendy education buzz phrases that means a lot of different things to different people. To some, it refers to instructional software, such as animated lectures and computerized worksheets. To others, it’s about personalized instruction, where computer algorithms determine what a student should learn next. Still others think of how [...]

When 11-year-old Rachelle Rosado opens up her laptop and puts on her headphones in her sixth-grade classroom, she hears an electronic voice: The prefix “sub” goes with “mit” and that makes the word “submit.” Rachelle attends an unusual charter school in an office building across the street from Newark City Hall. The school, Merit Prep, [...]