Oklahoma considers dropping high-school exit exams
Oklahoma’s landmark 2005 legislation, which mandated that all high-school students pass exams to be eligible for graduation, may be killed off before it even takes effect. The law, Achieving Classroom Excellence, requires seniors to pass sophomore-level tests in English, algebra and two other subjects—biology, algebra II, geometry, U.S. history or junior-level English—starting with the Class [...]
Tuition soars as Obama cuts student-loan payments
President Barack Obama’s announcement this week that he will reduce student-loan payments comes as Americans are approaching one trillion dollars in student-loan debt and the number of people defaulting on their college loans is steadily rising. The College Board reported yesterday that higher-education costs, including for public universities, are at an all-time high. But while the “Pay as You Earn” plan will make [...]
President Obama announces waiver plan for NCLB
President Barack Obama announced sweeping changes today that will allow states to apply for waivers from current requirements under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. As the deadline approaches for all students to be proficient in reading and math — by the year 2014 — the waivers will give states more control over how [...]
Survey: Colleges looking for students who can pay, some willing to lower standards
With the economy still sagging, many colleges and universities are focusing on students who can afford to pay more of the costs of attending, according to a survey by Inside Higher Ed. The survey, which was released Wednesday morning, included responses from more than 450 admissions officials at colleges and universities. One of the key [...]
Will this generation be the first to be less educated than their parents?
In July, reporter Jon Marcus wrote a piece for The Hechinger Report looking at President Barack Obama’s college graduation goal and how much progress has been made toward reaching it. The news wasn’t so good. Now he’s been interviewed by Boston NPR’s Here and Now program about the fact that this generation of Americans could [...]
Do early graduation programs really save states money?
Earlier this year, The Hechinger Report took a look at an increasingly popular method of reforming high schools: providing a scholarship to a state public university to seniors who graduate in under four years. Indiana passed such legislation in April, and, according to a policy brief recently released by Jobs for the Future, similar laws [...]
New website showcases rocketing college costs
For parents and students struggling to figure out how to best compare the price tags of different colleges, life just got a little easier. The Department of Education unveiled on Thursday the College Affordability and Transparency Center, which houses several lists of colleges and their prices. The new website also showcases how much tuition has [...]
Online learning: A solution to the budget crisis?
As school systems around the country face severe financial problems, everyone’s talking about what might be cut from budgets. There is one area, however, where spending is likely to increase in many parts of America: online learning. Proponents say online classes have many benefits, including allowing students to go at their own pace and increasing [...]
We need fewer, not more, college grads? Really?
One surefire way to get people’s attention is to say the exact opposite of what everyone else is saying — to claim that conventional wisdom is wrong. And sometimes, of course, conventional wisdom is wrong. This was one of the themes of Freakonomics, the hugely popular book by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt that went [...]
Venture capital for digital learning and technology
In a conference call with reporters today, Bill Gates announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will put up an initial $20 million to help colleges, non-profits, entrepreneurs and others to come up with new ways of using digital media in postsecondary education. (The Gates Foundation is one of the supporters of The Hechinger [...]
