Statistical Significance

Data has been playing a bigger role in the U.S. education system. Some schools have figured out how to use the numbers to make important changes. Others are left paralyzed by the overwhelming amount of information available.

Imagining a Virtual Education Oasis

The thing to know about author Ernest Cline is that he owns a DeLorean. Well, that, and he conceived a future where everyone who can will learn online.

That vision might seem exaggerated, but as virtual education continues to break into the mainstream of K-12 and higher education, and expands rapidly in job-training programs, his imaginary view of the future of education might have a stronger connection to reality than one might think at first glance.

10 Ways to Get Yourself Fired

Whatever you do as a non-tenure-track faculty member, don’t do any of these things.

Web-Filtering of Gay-Friendly Websites Settlement With ACLU Stirs Anger in Mo. Town

When attorneys for that group demanded that the high school in Camdenton, Mo., stop using an Internet filter that discriminated against gay-friendly websites, folks packed school board meetings.

How dare this New York City bunch come in here and tell how us to raise our kids!

They wanted to fight. The local tea party rallied the troops. The crowd at a Friday night football game cheered wildly when a plane flew over pulling the banner: THANK YOU CAMDENTON! GET LOST ACLU!

That was last fall. Now this lake town is really fuming.

Should Teachers and Students Be Facebook Friends?

Should students and teachers ever be friends on Facebook? School districts across the country, including the nation’s largest, are weighing that question as they seek to balance the risks of inappropriate contact with the academic benefits of social networking.

Obama targets diploma mills that market to vets

The Obama administration wants to trademark the term “GI Bill” in an effort to shield veterans and military families being swindled or misled by schools that target their federal education benefits.

President Barack Obama is signing a wide-ranging order on Friday that partially addresses growing complaints about fraudulent marketing and recruiting practices aimed at military families eligible for federal education loans under the GI Bill.

What Does It Mean to Be a Good School Leader?

To help teachers step back and think deeply about their instruction and how to improve it is a tough job, but it’s the job we need principals and other school leaders to do if schools are going to educate all students well.

That, at least, is what we concluded after conducting a study of 33 principals who led 24 successful schools.

Report: US makes modest gains in graduation rate

The last straw for 17-year-old Alton Burke was a note left on his door. The high school dropout picked up the phone and re-enrolled at South Hagerstown High.

Burke missed roughly 200 days of class, but Heather Dixon, the student intervention specialist who left the note, never gave up on him.

Aggressive efforts to prevent students such as Burke from dropping out contributed to a modest 3.5 percentage point increase nationally in the high school graduation rate from 2001 to 2009, according to research to be presented Monday at the Grad Nation summit in Washington. The event was organized by the children’s advocacy group America’s Promise Alliance founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Princeton Review Sells Brand, Test Prep Business

Princeton Review Inc. is selling its name for $33 million and turning its business on its head, concentrating on vocational programs and career-education instead of on test-prep and college rankings.

The sale comes two years after the company bought Penn Foster Education Group for $170 million, a deal that expanded Princeton Review into career education and looked to tap into the growing world of online education.

Start-Ups Try to Crack Education Market

Silicon Valley is going back to school.

Education, long a favorite cause among Bay Area philanthropists, is also starting to attract technologists who want to make money in it. That’s generating a boom in start-ups trying to make education more efficient.

…Overall, the size of the pre K-12 education software and digital-content industry is estimated at $7.5 billion in the U.S., according to the Software & Information Industry Association, mostly from sales of digital content like textbooks.

At colleges, degrees in 4 years or the rest free

A four-year college degree in many ways has become more suggestion than reality, to the chagrin of institutions whose reputations, rankings and recruiting prowess are tied to their success in handing out diplomas.

So as a way to improve the graduation rate, universities are promising students a four-year roadmap in exchange for a commitment they’ll stay on track.

A commitment to improve education and strengthen the teaching profession

Comments opening the last discussion at the International Summit for the Teaching Profession, New York, March 2012. By Fernando M. Reimers Ed.D., Ford Foundation Professor of International Education and Director of Global Education and of International Education Policy at Harvard University.

This has been a wonderful meeting for two reasons. First, because we are tackling one of the most important challenges of our time: how to create the conditions that give the next generation the skills to invent the future, a more humane, just and sustainable future.

Second, because in spite of the enormity of the challenge there is in this room a palpable sense of possibility, a sense that ‘yes, we can’ tackle the challenge of creating conditions that give every child and young person a chance to expand their minds and their freedoms.