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 [...]

Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in New York since 1975, has long believed that American universities should be playing a major role in improving the country’s secondary education. Botstein, who is also music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, says he’s less concerned about a decline [...]

America’s universities have long had a reputation for being the best in the world—a truth so apparently self-evident that it’s rarely been doubted or questioned. But what if the nation’s 5,000 institutions of higher education, as a whole, have fallen behind their international peers? Indeed, there’s lots of evidence that American higher education could be [...]

Is it really surprising that students in a tony New York suburb figured out a way, according to law-enforcement officials, to cheat on the SAT? When I first saw the headlines, I was slightly shocked at the audacity of a scam that allegedly involved a 19-year-old college student accepting large sums of money to take [...]

There’s a reason so many students in U.S. community colleges don’t finish: Not enough enter a specific, college-level program, according to Davis Jenkins, who has over 25 years of experience as a researcher, evaluator, consultant and program manager on projects related to education and employment in the U.S. and abroad. The Hechinger Report spoke with [...]

Why is the performance of students in other countries surpassing that of U.S. students? It’s a question that Marc S. Tucker, president and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy in Washington, D.C., sought to answer at a symposium last month focused on education reforms in other countries, including Canada, China, Finland, [...]

In 2006, former software engineer John Danner co-founded Rocketship Education, a national nonprofit elementary charter school network based in San Jose, Calif., with Preston Smith. The network is gaining attention for its “hybrid” model of learning, which blends classroom teaching with small-group tutoring and individualized online learning. Danner, who won the John P. McNulty Prize [...]

Psychiatrist Dr. Gary Small recently expressed a sentiment that may have crossed the minds of parents and educators who see how much time teenagers spend chatting online and texting: He worries they may not be learning empathy skills. The digital world has rewired teen brains and made them less able to recognize and share feelings of [...]

Middle-school principal Anthony Orsini of Ridgewood, N.J., made national headlines last year when he urged parents to keep their young adolescents off Facebook — at least until high school. The slings and arrows of social-media stings by peers — also known as cyberbullying — were far more common than any from adult predators, Orsini said, [...]

Is it really a new day for education in the U.S.?  There is no dearth of opinions — or questions — about what could change now that Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives in Tuesday’s elections.  One conclusion is generally shared, though: Federal money will be scarce. The economy — and not [...]

A year after President Barack Obama stood up at Macomb Community College in Michigan to highlight the need for more graduates and to announce the American Graduation Initiative, the nation’s publicly funded two-year colleges are playing a significant role in his administration’s education and economic initiatives – for better or worse. Community colleges enroll nearly [...]

Community colleges – typically the country’s cheapest option for higher education – face a new and unlikely rival: the fast-growing industry of for-profit colleges. To understand why students are turning to more expensive options like for-profits, it’s helpful to consider the case of Joseph Carrillo Jr., a 24-year-old who until recently attended American River College [...]

For far too many community college students, remedial education is where their college careers begin – and end. Their need to take catch-up courses in subjects never mastered in high school remains one of the most intractable obstacles to community-college graduation. Some students repeatedly fail the classes, running up debt or cutting into financial aid [...]

NEW YORK – A New York Supreme Court judge will decide whether the public has a right to see individual teacher ratings based on student test scores in the nation’s largest school district, an indication that the days when 99 percent of teachers were rated “satisfactory” are over. Arguments before the court will be held [...]

President Barack Obama has led the push for more U.S. college graduates, even though in a tough economy with competing demands the money to support the push hasn’t materialized — at least, not as Obama had once hoped. From the South comes another new graduation initiative — this one calling for 60 percent of adults aged [...]

At a time when teachers are under pressure to improve test scores and show what kind of progress their students are making, the superintendent of schools in Minneapolis has also decided to spell out exactly how the public can hold her accountable. No doubt the recession and the state’s financial woes have contributed to the superintendent’s decision.

At a time when jobs are scarce, it should come as no surprise that higher percentages of students are defaulting on their college loans. Default rates increased from 5.9 percent to 6.0 percent at public institutions, and from 3.7 to 4.0 percent at private colleges and universities, new U.S. Department of Education data show. The [...]

This is the time of year Inver Hills Community College Vice President Barbara Read stands in the door of the admissions office and greets new students with a four-word question: “What is your goal?” The question goes to the heart of the Minnesota college’s five-year-old “Finish What You Start” effort to improve retention, completion and [...]