|
|
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 students who are consistently underserved. Fixing the system, according to Romney, is the “civil rights issue of our era.”
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 public debate is [...]
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 education. [...]
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 waiver that releases the states from having to meet targets education officials have long complained are too rigid [...]
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, Obama put forward a proposal on Friday at the University of Michigan that, if [...]
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 of No Child Left Behind no longer outweighs the bad.
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 changed. While Head Start’s aim to prepare low-income students for kindergarten is noble, it’s still faces questions about its demonstrable [...]
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, the refrain that teachers are underpaid is a constant. So, when conservative thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation issued a paper on Tuesday arguing not only that teachers are overpaid, but that total compensation for teachers is 52% higher than fair market value, it was bound to be controversial.
