Getting your middle-schooler in front of a high-quality teacher for even one year will improve his or her chances of going to college and earning a good salary later in life, according to a recent study. The study’s authors used value-added modeling—predicting how well a given student will do on a standardized test, controlling for [...]

In America’s push for education reform, the college completion problem is now under the microscope. The Obama Administration’s goal, for instance, is to have 60 percent of young people (aged 25-34) across the country with some postsecondary credential by 2020. But experts say this can’t be reached until another problem is solved; 1.2 million students [...]

Harvard University announced today that it is joining MIT in offering free online courses—and that the two institutions will together spend $60 million on a project that will grant certificates of completion to those who finish a Harvard or MIT course online. The universities will also make their courses available at no cost to other [...]

The field of education often adopts technologies well after they appear in the business world. Perhaps for this reason, more and more entrepreneurs are seeing opportunity in adapting these technologies for the education space, and there is a growing community of business-minded people trying to solve some of education’s biggest problems. The companies have names [...]

Social media, video games, blogs and wikis are playing increasingly important roles in classrooms across the country. Some worry that incorporating more social media and other technologies into education is leading to too much computer time, as well as to a generation of students deficient in the face-to-face social skills needed to survive in the [...]

Increasing educational attainment among Latino students—who are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, and who consistently lag behind their white and Asian peers in college completion—is a priority of many advocates and policymakers. Patricia Gándara, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, has been focused on this issue for decades. She recently spoke [...]

It’s no secret that the growing Latino population in America will have large implications for the U.S. educational landscape over the next generation. By 2020, Latinos are projected to account for 25 percent of the nation’s population aged 18-29. Government officials, policymakers and teachers alike face the challenge of improving the services and support provided [...]

Low college graduation rates are a hot topic of discussion in America, with frequent mention of the fact that we’re falling behind other countries. As more nontraditional students attend college and the cost of higher education continues to rise, the challenges for those trying to obtain a degree continue to grow. To address these issues, [...]

Educators, administrators, techies and entrepreneurs descended upon Austin, Texas for the 2nd annual South by Southwest Education conference (SXSWedu) on March 6th. The opening day’s sessions spanned multiple panels on e-textbooks and the spread of open education resources (OERs), free content that can be used and shared by teachers and students. Other sessions covered the [...]

Deborah Gist, Rhode Island’s Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, has implemented some major reforms since assuming her role in 2009. She has raised the score required to pass teacher-certification tests and allowed a superintendent to fire all of the teachers at a school that was resisting reforms. Perhaps most notably, she has overseen the [...]

CHICAGO – On a recent Friday morning, 15-year-old Jerod Franklin stared at his hands as he labored to type up memories of the first time he grilled steak. Next to him, classmate Brittany Levy tackled a piece about a trip to the hospital. The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute ninth-graders were working on writing assignments in the [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Buffy Hamilton, who calls herself “The Unquiet Librarian,” holds the phone receiver away from her ear at Creekview High School library in Canton, Ga., revealing a cacophony of noise in the background. “It sounds like that a lot of the time,” says Hamilton, who welcomes what she calls “the hum of learning”—students talking about projects, [...]

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 [...]

At The Hechinger Report, we’re trying to learn—and share—as much as possible about the ways digital learning is changing American schools. We’ve recently conducted Q&As with former Governor of West Virgina Bob Wise and video game writer and designer-turned-college-professor Lee Sheldon. This week we spoke to Lisa Gillis, president of Integrated Educational Strategies, a nonprofit [...]

As part of our coverage of international education, reporter Blaine Harden traveled to Japan recently to learn more about a five-year program that educates a small number of students at 57 high-skill, hands-on national colleges of technology, known as Kosen. Kosen schools are helping to close a “skills gap”–which the United States faces as well–where graduates [...]

Fourth- and eighth-graders’ scores showed modest improvement and racial achievement gaps narrowed on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” which was released Tuesday. The gap between disadvantaged students and their more affluent peers remained largely unchanged, however, and widened in fourth-grade reading. Compared to 2009, this [...]