Community

Thought leader and community advocate Bill Milliken took time (see interview below) to share his thoughts on education reform today and how we are currently impacted by yesterday’s lessons. Milliken has worked to integrate mentorship into the dropout recovery discussion ever since his first “street academies” opened up in the early 1960’s. 

When schools and parents let students follow curiosity and design real-world experiences, they discover creativity that can’t be taught — only inspired.

In this country, President Obama signed a new education law last week. Much of the focus has been on testing and a debate over whether the law moved too far away from rigorous standards. But one group celebrating the law advocates for arts education. NPR’s Elizabeth Blair explains why.

By Antonio Gois
Tying teacher pay to student test scores. Creating public schools of choice with private operators. Setting common standards for all students. Those issues probably are familiar to any American reporter who covers education.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the privacy of citizens in an age when websites, email providers and software makers suck up and store information on users, started the Spying on Students Campaign to make sure student information stays secure.

England’s private schools are struggling to attract pupils. Although the number of school-age children has risen since 2008, independent schools have barely grown. As a result, the proportion of children at such schools has slipped from 7.2% to 6.9%, with absolute numbers falling everywhere apart from the prosperous south-east (see chart). Why are English parents—a famously pushy bunch—increasingly reluctant to pay for their children’s education?

Teachers in England are among the best paid in the world – but they fall far behind those in Luxembourg, where those in the profession can expect to get paid more than £60,000 a year.

After two open-heart surgeries, I saw firsthand how “one size fits all” medicine can harm recovery. Education’s obsession with standardization is no different.

By Bill Bush If the state of Ohio’s transition to new proficiency tests didn’t kill the “parent trigger,” it’s put it on life support. The GOP-backed law that created the …