So how are college graduates really doing? A few schools are willing to tell us
A word rarely uttered on college tours sits atop the website of St. Olaf, a small liberal-arts college south of Minneapolis with an annual estimated cost of $51,860. Next to clickable categories about arts and athletics appears the unlikely word “outcomes.’’ And if you click on the word, a headline materializes promising “The Return on […]
A mayor’s case to support the awkward years
New York City’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, wants to offer after-school programs to all 200,000-plus middle school kids here. To that, you might ask, why middle school? Why not elementary or high? In an ideal world, of course, every child of every age would have a constructive way to spend the time between class […]
A shorter school year and mandatory homework: What Mississippi’s lawmakers are proposing for education this year
JACKSON, Miss.—Lawmakers in Mississippi have proposed more than 200 education laws for the 2014 session, in what is poised to be the second consecutive legislative session with a heavy focus on schools. As expected, many of the bills touch on the most contentious national and statewide issues in education, like grade-level standards, teacher pay and […]
Could New York’s Pre-k plan pit politics and posturing above kids?
No matter who ends up paying for universal pre-k program in New York, it seems that both Cuomo and de Blasio have a lot of work ahead. There hasn’t been enough room or enough money or enough support for such programs in years.
Learning future
Our education system is like “a giant canoe with 50 million students,” says Brian Greenberg of Silicon Schools Fund, which funds blended-learning schools. “We talk about what the canoe is made of and where the teachers should sit, but we don’t give the kids a paddle.” We should be skeptics about blended learning, he said at the […]
Blend, flip, disrupt
When she introduced Khan Academy videos and quizzes to her sixth-grade math students, Suney Park had to “give up control,” she said at a Blended Learning in K-12 conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. “That’s hard.” But the software lets her students work at their own level and their own pace, moving on only when they’ve […]
In San Diego, students juxtapose art and science to learn about the deadliest cancer
Imagine understanding how doctors diagnose melanoma by looking at a painting of ugly ducklings. That’s just one example of the 22 paintings a class of 11th-graders in San Diego have created in their art class in order to educate themselves and others about melanoma, a type of skin cancer. Students at San Diego’s High Tech […]
