Six years ago, the head of the tutoring program for athletes at UNC-Chapel Hill paved the way for a valued employee to have her retirement party at a spacious, climate-controlled luxury box in Kenan Stadium. He persuaded the athletic department to waive a $1,000 rental fee and offered to pay the $575 tab for wait service and cleanup.
A small survey of parents in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of their children had been given tablets, smartphones or iPods of their own by age 4 and had used the devices without supervision, researchers reported on Monday.
By Motoko Rich
By Lauren Camera
Find out how design thinking and collaborative innovation are revitalizing education, inspired by leaders like Molly McMahon at IDEO and The Teachers Guild.
Explore expert insights from Jaime Singer on assessing and enhancing your child’s afterschool programs with practical, high-impact strategies.
By Andrew P. KellyOver just a few years, college affordability has gone from a minor political issue to a headlining one. Why? A wider swath of the income distribution is feeling the pinch, and they are feeling it for longer. Tuition has increased at the same time that family incomes have declined, meaning responsible middle-class families who have saved for college can no longer afford it. Thanks to growing reliance on loans, what used to be a temporary financial crunch has become a lasting financial obligation that hangs around students and parents for years. For the 40 percent of students who drop out, these loans can quickly become an albatross. Taken together, these trends are a recipe for a broader political coalition in search of college affordability.
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.
