Say what you want about the woman, this strikes me as a profoundly shady choice for a magazine cover of a political figure. Pigtails and short shorts? Come on, now.

Conservative pundits are pissed, and so is she. But maybe we all should be a little bit? Her confusing use of the third person aside, I agree with her comments. In her words (from her Facebook page):

“The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is…

Well this is something: Wesleyan, one of the country’s more elite schools, has started a program where inmates in a nearby high-security prison can take some of its classes. Not dumbed-down versions either, thank god: these are real, academically rigorous, competitive-to-get-into college classes.

Whether the credits can add up to a degree depends on how long the program lasts. I seriously hope they get it together to keep this program in place and funded, because education…

Great discussion over at Chronicle of Higher Education about who should and should not go to college, and whether the model at most universities is serving students and, well, worth the money.

They asked the same couple of questions to nine higher education experts and the responses fell into two predictable camps.

Camp one: Postsecondary education is a practical necessity that everyone should pursue and have access to. Sample quote from Daniel Yankelovich, a public-policy expert: “In today’s…

Ten9Eight, a new documentary by Mary Mazzio, looks at how turning kids into budding businesspeople may be the antidote to the dropout crisis.

When President Obama delivered his stay-in-school speech, reminding students for the umpteenth time that they can’t all grow up to be rappers and basketball players, he caused a stir. It sparked overblown controversy, but it also brought into the national conversation the fact that every year, 1.2 million kids drop out of school—or, one…

Last week we got the delightful news that a story we ran in our water issue won an Earth Journalism Award. The article, “The Water’s Edge,” by William Wheeler, looked at how India and Pakistan are grappling with the emerging water crisis. We thought it was a great read (we’re biased), and apparently so did their jurors. Now they want the public to weigh in.

If you want to see who else won and/or vote for our…

There’s a lot of focus right now on innovation in education: how to support it nationally, how to find smart local solutions that can work at scale, how to get our schools out of the gutter, quite simply. And since sometimes it’s helpful to know what’s wrong in order to figure out how to make it right, a handy new report—which is utterly depressing—might provide some clues. Some states fared okay; others totally bombed. How…

Only the ACLU would think of this: They have banded with parents and student of Palm Beach County and mounted a trailblazing class-action lawsuit, the only of its kind (ever?), claiming that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by the incredibly horribly awful schools there, which result in low graduation rates, particularly among blacks and Latinos.

The county, for its part, says it’d doing a fine job, of course. So let’s look real quick at the numbers.

According…

Say what you want about the woman, this strikes me as a profoundly shady choice for a magazine cover of a political figure. Pigtails and short shorts? Come on, now.

Conservative pundits are pissed, and so is she. But maybe we all should be a little bit? Her confusing use of the third person aside, I agree with her comments. In her words (from her Facebook page):

“The choice of photo for the cover of this week’s Newsweek is…

Well this is something: Wesleyan, one of the country’s more elite schools, has started a program where inmates in a nearby high-security prison can take some of its classes. Not dumbed-down versions either, thank god: these are real, academically rigorous, competitive-to-get-into college classes.

Whether the credits can add up to a degree depends on how long the program lasts. I seriously hope they get it together to keep this program in place and funded, because education…

Great discussion over at Chronicle of Higher Education about who should and should not go to college, and whether the model at most universities is serving students and, well, worth the money.

They asked the same couple of questions to nine higher education experts and the responses fell into two predictable camps.

Camp one: Postsecondary education is a practical necessity that everyone should pursue and have access to. Sample quote from Daniel Yankelovich, a public-policy expert: “In today’s…

Ten9Eight, a new documentary by Mary Mazzio, looks at how turning kids into budding businesspeople may be the antidote to the dropout crisis.

When President Obama delivered his stay-in-school speech, reminding students for the umpteenth time that they can’t all grow up to be rappers and basketball players, he caused a stir. It sparked overblown controversy, but it also brought into the national conversation the fact that every year, 1.2 million kids drop out of school—or, one…

Last week we got the delightful news that a story we ran in our water issue won an Earth Journalism Award. The article, “The Water’s Edge,” by William Wheeler, looked at how India and Pakistan are grappling with the emerging water crisis. We thought it was a great read (we’re biased), and apparently so did their jurors. Now they want the public to weigh in.

If you want to see who else won and/or vote for our…

There’s a lot of focus right now on innovation in education: how to support it nationally, how to find smart local solutions that can work at scale, how to get our schools out of the gutter, quite simply. And since sometimes it’s helpful to know what’s wrong in order to figure out how to make it right, a handy new report—which is utterly depressing—might provide some clues. Some states fared okay; others totally bombed. How…

Only the ACLU would think of this: They have banded with parents and student of Palm Beach County and mounted a trailblazing class-action lawsuit, the only of its kind (ever?), claiming that students’ constitutional rights are being violated by the incredibly horribly awful schools there, which result in low graduation rates, particularly among blacks and Latinos.

The county, for its part, says it’d doing a fine job, of course. So let’s look real quick at the numbers.

According…

Well this is interesting: The President and Arne Duncan are celebrating Obama’s first anniversary in office by pushing states to come up with bold ways to reform education. Until recently, it seemed to me that education had fallen off the administration’s priority list entirely. Then Obama delivered his intense and hated-by-conservatives stay-in-school plea (follow that link for video and transcript), where he put the onus on kids to take responsibility for their own education, and now…

Why has Argentina been unable to sustain a democracy? Why has establishing Iraq’s been particularly dicey? According to the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, it comes down to schools. If we want stable democracies, he writes, we need to invest in education. Being a numbers guy, though, he doesn’t just argue the case philosophically. He’s got data to back him up.

What kind of data? The kind that shows that the more educated a country is, the…

In case you missed it, Nicholas Kristof had an interesting piece about Afghanistan late last week where he posits that instead of a doomed-to-fail attempt at counterinsurgency, we should spend the money on education instead. Why? Because “for the cost of a single additional soldier stationed in Afghanistan for one year, we could build roughly 20 schools there.”

He builds the argument well, citing awesome organizations that have successfully built and maintained schools in the country—none of which get…