(WASHINGTON) — Schools near military bases and tribal lands will face a $60 million shortfall between now and September and aid to college students will be cut by almost $90 million, according to the Education Department’s plan to carry out the automatic spending cuts mandated by Congress.
In all, the Education Department lost $2.6 …
(WASHINGTON) — State funding for pre-kindergarten programs had its largest drop ever last year and states are now spending less per child than they did a decade ago, according to a report released Monday.
The report also found that more than a half million of those preschool students are in programs that don’t even meet standards …
School vouchers are back in the news except that proponents of the idea, including Mitt Romney, are not using the word vouchers any more. For some reason voters don’t like that term, but they do like the idea of giving parents more choices, so vouchers — I mean “scholarships” and “choice” are a big part of Mr. Romney’s …
In a speech at the Latino Coalition’s annual economic summit in Washington on Wednesday, May 23, Mitt Romney called the U.S. education system a failure. Every child deserves a quality education, he said, particularly minority …
Student debt is completely out of control, right? The more than $1 trillion in outstanding college loans is front-page news and is pretty much the only educational issue the presidential candidates are talking about. Yes, ballooning student debt is causing real hardship for some Americans. But as with many educational flare-ups, the …
According to a recent poll, 67 percent of registered voters in swing states said education was “extremely important” to them in this year’s election. Parents of high schoolers and college students are particularly worried, or they should be, that the interest rate on federally backed student loans is set to double in July, from 3.4 …
For much of the past two weeks, as Rick Santorum’s candidacy star power has increased, so too have his critiques of public education. At recent campaign events and in last Thursday’s debate, he called American public schools “big factories” left over from the Industrial Revolution and argued for decreasing federal and state roles in …
President Obama granted 10 states relief from the strictest requirements of No Child Left Behind on Thursday, in a move he said combines “greater freedom with greater responsibility.” That freedom is provided in the form of a …
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday night, President Obama “put colleges and universities on notice.” Find a way to stop tuition from going up, he told them, or risk losing federal aid money. Following up on that charge, …
For all its admirable intentions and the measurable gains it has produced, a decade after George W. Bush’s signature education overhaul became law, the consensus among policymakers and educators is grim: The good that’s come …
Just four years after the federally funded preschool program Head Start began in 1965, it was slapped by a report, commissioned by the Johnson Administration, that questioned its effectiveness. Forty years later, not much has …
A few months ago, I wrote a controversial column about the Head Start pre-school program, in which I cited the Department of Health and Human Services’ own study that showed Head Start wasn’t making much of a difference. I quoted an Obama Administration official acknowledging the problem, especially in the Head Start programs run by …
It’s not often that you hear teachers should be paid less. In fact, it’s almost always the exact opposite. From teachers unions to education reformers to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the refrain that teachers are underpaid …
