New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS) is at risk of losing a $190 million grant, after the federal government included it on a list of 132 substandard Head Start agencies across the country this week. Head Start is the half-century-old federal preschool program for low-income children. ACS, among the oldest and largest Head [...]

The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years. The winners are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington state. To win, they promised [...]

In Washington, D.C., one of the first places in the country to use value-added teacher ratings to fire teachers, teacher-union president Nathan Saunders likes to point to the following statistic as proof that the ratings are flawed: Ward 8, one of the poorest areas of the city, has only 5 percent of the teachers defined [...]

The number of people living in concentrated poverty rose substantially over the past decade, according to a Brookings Institution report published on Nov. 3rd: ”After declining in the 1990s, the population in extreme-poverty neighborhoods—where at least 40 percent of individuals live below the poverty line—rose by one-third from 2000 to 2005–09.” Education reformers who ascribe to the [...]

New education reforms often translate into big money for private groups. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually to companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools. Now, a movement [...]

In California, the state with the largest population of Hispanic students in the country, the achievement gap starts early—long before children enter school. Hispanic children are much less likely to enroll in preschool than white or black children, and begin kindergarten more than half a year behind their white counterparts. First-generation immigrant students, many who [...]

SOLEDAD, Calif.–On a cool winter morning Nicole Miller circulated through her fourth-grade classroom in this small town in the Salinas Valley, quizzing students on material they’d likely see on state tests in the spring. “How do you know ‘hit the lights’ is an idiom?” she asked a student. “ ‘Hit the lights’ is an idiom [...]

BALDWIN PARK, Calif.–The end of the school day in Patty Sanchez’s kindergarten class at Geddes Elementary School is not so different from other kindergarten classes around the state. Children gather on a rug as Sanchez holds up a storybook about a coyote and a turtle and reads out loud. What’s different is that Sanchez is [...]

The next installment of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top education-reform competition, focused on the youngest students, got off to a big start yesterday. Nearly three-quarters of the states threw their hats in the ring to win a portion of the $500 million the administration is offering to states with the best plans to overhaul their [...]

Ruby Khatoon’s experience is common for many young women in Bihar, India’s poorest state: Her father didn’t allow her to go to school because the 50 cents she earned each day making incense was too valuable. At age 15, she didn’t even know the alphabet. Her neighbor Nazia Hassan, 16, dropped out of school in [...]

A new report showing that some high-achieving students fall behind (although not far behind) as they progress through school is reviving an argument in favor of tracking students by ability levels. America’s focus on closing the achievement gap during the past decade has left “advanced students to fend for themselves,” Frederick Hess, a researcher at [...]

BENNINGTON, Vt.—For much of high school, Jaelyn Marshall, a 17-year-old from Harlem, was an indifferent student. She worked hard her senior year, but it wasn’t enough to make up for three years of bad grades. “Every college I applied to said, ‘Sorry, we don’t want you,’ ” Marshall said. She’s starting college this month after [...]

On an unseasonably warm evening last November, Glendalys Delgado lowered herself into a child-sized chair in the classroom of her youngest son, Juan, a second-grader at Thomas Dudley Elementary School in Camden, New Jersey. Juan’s teacher, Shakira Wyche, sat next to her looking serious. “You’re going to be a little upset,” Wyche told Delgado as [...]

Knowing the subject matter is all well and good, but one skill that many new teachers lack as they embark on their first year of teaching is how to control a classroom, or so say many critics of teacher education. This critical skill along with the other practical aspects of teaching — how to teach [...]

A simmering scandal in Atlanta over cheating on standardized tests came to a head this week as state investigators released a report that found in the city’s schools “an enterprise where unethical—and potentially illegal—behavior pierced every level of the bureaucracy,” according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The scandal follows closely on the heels of a [...]

A few years ago, preschool teachers in Santa Maria, a low-income, mostly Hispanic city north of Santa Barbara, CA, attended a series of meetings with kindergarten teachers in the district. Most had never met. Although their students were only a year apart in age, teachers had little idea what happened in each other’s classrooms. What [...]

Just how well do students who attend five of the largest, most well-known for-profit schools in the U.S. do when it comes to repaying their loans? The Hechinger Report decided to take a closer look following the release of new federal rules meant to police institutions that critics contend take advantage of poor and unprepared [...]

On a recent spring morning at the St. Elizabeth’s Head Start center in North Philadelphia, Ashley Post, a first-year teacher freshly graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, clicked on her “listening ears” and patted down her “thinking cap” as a room full of 15 preschoolers imitated her every move. Many of the children were here [...]