A New Push to Get Low-Income Students Through CollegeIn The News

By David Leonhardt The United States fails to do right by most low-income students who excel in school. They overcome long odds and do well enough in high school to show they can thrive in college. Nevertheless, many never receive a bachelor’s degree. Now, though, the country may be approaching something of a turning point. […]

A new report finds that U.S. students’ financial literacy is only average compared to students worldwide. So what can be done to improve the performance of our schools? Education correspondent John Merrow reports on one test that may help American students compete more successfully in an increasingly global economy.

Andreas Schleicher may be the most important name in education that you don’t know. The German statistician has been the lead figure in creation, interpretation, and now worldwide use of several tests that are the basis for comparing how students in different countries are doing. Every time you hear someone say the United States is […]

Why? From all sides, this appears to be the main question surrounding the Common Core State Standards – the set of K-12 math and English standards created by education professionals from all 50 states, which promote higher-order thinking skills aimed at preparing students for college, career and life. My students ask why they are reading […]

If you scrambled to file your tax return by yesterday’s deadline, you might take comfort in knowing that most Americans — 55 percent in a 2013 Gallup poll — say the amount they pay in income tax is fair (although that figure has been higher in recent years). The number conceals big differences of opinion, of […]

We heard a lot last month about global competitiveness, and learned that the United States is not faring as well as one would hope on the Program for International Student Assessment. Though it may be tempting to just focus on the PISA rankings, it is important to look beyond rankings and learn from our global […]

American schools, by holding steady on international test scores released today, are falling further behind the world’s top-performing countries in reading, science and especially math. While alarms sound across the country about the state of U.S. education, voices from all directions are stressing that it is not the rankings that matter, but how school systems […]

Assessment tests must measure performance against students around the world, not just the country Educators need to have a clear understanding of how well we’re educating students, not just in comparison to other students within the region or the nation but throughout the world. As the country moves beyond the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) […]

There was a time when middle-class parents in America could be — and were — content to know that their kids’ public schools were better than those in the next neighborhood over. As the world has shrunk, though, the next neighborhood over is now Shanghai or Helsinki. So, last August, I wrote a column quoting […]