Education secretary takes aim at low graduation rates while student debt is rising fastEducation Secretary Arne Duncan is preparing to unveil a package of proposals aimed at forcing colleges that receive federal money to improve graduation rates and to provide students with job skills. The proposals will be aimed at accreditors, the not-for-profit agencies that must give their seal of approval so schools can take part in the federal student-loan system. The overhaul effort comes as student debt has climbed to $1.2 trillion, but graduation rates remain not much better than a “coin toss,” Mr. Duncan has said.

By Sean TrainorCommunity colleges have been at the forefront of nearly every major development in higher educationIn January of 2015, President Obama unveiled his “American College Promise” program – a plan to make two years of community college education available free of charge to “everyone who’s willing to work for it.” In offering the proposal, the president did not just venture a partial solution to the student debt crisis. He joined a growing community of thinkerswho see the community college as central to solving a wide variety of problems in higher education, from cost and inclusivity to career-preparedness and community engagement.

By Griselda NevarezThe U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday released a resource guide to help undocumented students and educators ensure that young people are on a path to academic success regardless of their immigration status. 

As always, our NPR Ed inboxes are clogged with press releases about the latest amazeballs app or product. Like the following, edited to protect the guilty:…an unprecedented new DOODLEHICKY app optimized for iPhone® and Android™ smartphones that includes real-time monitoring of a child’s learning progress. DOODLEHICKY is the tutoring program that fuses the most effective elements of personalized teaching with a fun and engaging iPad® and Android tablet-based experience for measurably improving student DOODLE performance.

Special correspondent John Merrow has reported on education for more than four decades, and for the PBS NewsHour since the 1980s. Now retiring, he joins Judy Woodruff to talk about what he’s observed over the years.

Online education will grow up by scaling down. In spite of the practical and theoretical possibilities of e-learning, the very qualities that have enabled massive open online courses (or MOOCs) to serve prodigious numbers of learners—machine-graded assessment, prescriptive course design, and self-paced enrollment—have also tend to promote antiquated pedagogy, curtail student engagement, and preclude a sense of cohort. It doesn’t have to be that way.

As the competition for brains heats up, more U.S. students are heading to the UK to earn their college degrees.Students have come back to college. But not all to the United States.

Three decades ago, Chinese cities began turning rural land into industrial parks to attract foreign investors. Today, a new kind of project is blooming in China’s countryside: the vocational education park.Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks – dubbed “education factories” – designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.

Hoping to offer more alternatives, particularly to low-income students considering substandard for-profit colleges, the Education Department is unveiling a pilot program on Wednesday to allow students to use federal loans and grants for nontraditional education like boot camp software coding programs and MOOCs, or massive open online courses.

Place a 30cm ruler on top of one finger from each hand. What happens when you bring your fingers together?Can archaeology prove or disprove the Bible?Two tricky questions of the sort asked at interviews for Oxford University places, which are being published by the university ahead of the application deadline for 2016 entry on Wednesday.

A small cut in the pupil-teacher ratio and the creation of 2,260 additional teaching posts are the key education measures of Budget 2016.The Department of Education and Skills is to receive an extra €144 million next year, bringing its budget to €8.5 billion.From next September, the pupil-teacher ratio at primary level will fall from 28:1 to 27:1. This will require about 300 extra teaching posts. Some 810 mainstream teaching posts are also being created to address demographic demand.

The Internet is a hub where virtually everything can be a commodity, and students with Web access have entry to a wealth of information. That same principle now applies to teachers.Some argue that education is a learning tool that should be free nationwide, yet some teachers are starting to cash in on the same classroom lessons they teach, with help from an online education resource called TeachersPayTeachers.com (TpT).

When we think of education technology, we often imagine large-scale impact and reach. But it’s not that straightforward.Stacked amidst temporary shelters, tents and thatched huts in Burundi’s Kavumu refugee camp are a pile of bright blue, green and yellow boxes. Stowed away in these 800 kg metal palette-size boxes are countless ideas to educate, entertain and foster creativity among refugees. The self-contained watertight boxes are packed with e-readers, tablets, cameras, e-books, paperbacks, board games and e-learning tools to offer educational and training opportunities to refugee children and adults and prepare them to reintegrate the world. In less than 20 minutes, the boxes are unfolded into interactive media centres with tables and chairs.

When the Obama administration agreed to erase the federal loan debt of some former students at Corinthian Colleges, a for-profit school that filed for bankruptcy in the face of charges of widespread fraud, education officials promised to “protect students from abusive colleges and safeguard the interests of taxpayers.”

Many of you know Patrick Larkin from Connected Principals fame. Larkin took time to discuss many of his experiences in education and the career path that took him from classroom teacher to Assistant Superintendent. Check out Larkin’s latest op-ed, in EdWeek, about the number of learning opportunities October has for everyone in education including Connected Educator Month.Patrick Larkin is the Burlington Public Schools Assistant Superintendent for Learning. Prior to this position, Larkin served 15 years as a building level administrator at the high school level. In 2012, in recognition of his exemplary use of digital tools as a school leader, he was recognized as one of three national Digital Principal Award winners by the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). As the Burlington High School Principal, Patrick led his school in the transition to a 1:1 environment for the 2011-2012 school year and became one of the first schools in …