If you’re spending any time in the company of ambitious high-school seniors or hyper-competitive parents these days, you may be reading Facebook posts with status updates proclaiming acceptances at prestigious colleges: “Dartmouth! Duke! Vassar! Swag! I’m three for three!” You may not read about rejections, but you will certainly hear plenty about them, along with [...]

The Los Angeles school board election attracted enormous amounts of outside money and attention, so it’s no surprise that lots of people are claiming victory in the aftermath. In the end, an incumbent aligned with Supt. John Deasy and an incumbent supported by the teachers union each won, while a third candidate will be in [...]

Questions about how much President Barack Obama’s ambitious early childhood partnership plan will cost and how quality will be maintained emerged immediately on Thursday, soon after Obama delivered long awaited details in Decatur, Ga. “Study after study shows that the earlier a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road,’’ Obama [...]

At a time when child poverty is on the rise and the median family income down, the unlikely success story of schools in Union City, N.J. is drawing some attention – and so is the role that high-quality early education may have played in this poor and largely minority community. “Ask school officials to explain [...]

For education advocates in Mississippi, it must be difficult to sit quietly and watch the tepid progress, or, as some put it last week, “small scale ideas,” that are emerging in a state with a perpetual education crisis. After all, it’s been 30 years since the so-called “Christmas Miracle“—the historic December day when former Democratic [...]

MOORHEAD, Miss. — JeMira Nichols entered kindergarten in this sleepy Delta town way ahead of her classmates. She knew colors, letters and numbers. She spoke in full sentences. She could discuss books comfortably. Until she started school in August, JeMira spent nine hours each week day at Little Angels Day Care, a well-equipped one-story center [...]

A new conversation about pre-k is emerging in Mississippi as citizens examine the reasons behind the state’s woeful academic performance—documented in the first story of our “Mississippi Learning” series and since taken up by other news media in the state. This is an important conversation in Mississippi, which has the highest rate of childhood poverty [...]

Iowa has surprisingly global ambitions to improve its education system. That’s why I found myself moderating sessions at the Iowa Teacher and Principal Leadership Symposium with titles such as “Better Than We Used to Do is Not Good Enough” and “Leadership Lessons From Around the Globe” before a sold-out crowd at Drake University in Des [...]

CANTON, Miss.—When school begins next month in Mississippi, Akeeleon Lewis will head to kindergarten for the second time. He started school last fall not knowing his colors or numbers. “He couldn’t even hold a pencil,” says Judy Packer, his kindergarten teacher at McNeal Elementary School in Canton, a city of 13,000 about 30 miles northeast [...]

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 [...]