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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.

By Yvonne Wingett SanchezAfter years of ignoring pleas to put significant money into schools, Arizona politicians are suddenly tripping over each other to find a way to pump billions of dollars into education.Gov. Doug Ducey, Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas, and many Republican and Democratic lawmakers want to dig deeper into state coffers to get more money to schools, and each has a plan.

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.