Education News

Challenging Conventional Wisdom, New Report Suggests Diversity of America’s Teaching Force Has Not Kept Pace With Population

Taking aim at the perception that efforts to diversify the teaching profession are working, a new study by the Brookings Institution shows that the educator workforce is growing disproportionately white over time. The analysis, released last week, offers a counterintuitive finding since the educator workforce has become more diverse in recent years — a fact researchers from Brookings’s...Read More

New Coalition on Transition to Postsecondary

A new coalition of leaders from 18 education organizations, dubbed Level Up, is seeking to alleviate the “stubborn misalignment between K-12 and higher education that too often derails U.S. students from earning a postsecondary degree or credential and becoming economically self-sufficient.” The group wants to measurably increase numbers of high school students,...Read More

What are the reading research insights that every educator should know?

If your district isn’t having an “uh oh” moment around reading instruction, it probably should be. Educators across the country are experiencing a collective awakening about literacy instruction, thanks to a recent tsunami of national media attention. Alarm bells are ringing—as they should be—because we’ve gotten some big things wrong: Research has documented what works to get kids to read,...Read More

One Reason Rural Students Don’t Go To College: Colleges Don’t Go To Them

The sunrise in rural central Michigan reveals a landscape of neatly divided cornfields crossed by ditches and wooded creeks. But few of the sleepy teenagers on the school bus from Maple Valley Junior-Senior High School likely noticed this scene on their hour drive to Grand Rapids. They set out from their tiny school district of about 1,000 students, heading to the closest big city for a...Read More

Memphis school leaders consider proposal to hold back second-graders who can’t read

In an effort to boost literacy among its youngest students, Shelby County Schools has proposed a policy that would require second-graders to repeat the school year if they don’t read on grade level. The district and state have struggled to get students ready to read by third grade and have heavily invested in literacy instruction. That has led to significant growth in reading scores...Read More

Diverse: Issues in Higher Education: Report Envisions Path Forward for Educational Equity in Tennessee

Tennessee’s work to increase its residents’ postsecondary attainment levels through initiatives such as the “Drive to 55” campaign, Tennessee Promise and Tennessee Reconnect has positioned the state as a national model, but leaders must not get complacent with the progress made thus far. That was the sentiment of a new Complete Tennessee report released Tuesday titled “No Time to Wait: The...Read More

STUDENT VOICE: ‘College was just another foreign word. Then it became a dream for every student in my school’

For first-generation students, the dream of going to college is fraught. It’s hard just to get there. The average school-counselor-to-student ratio in the country is 484 to 1, and this lack of support hinders students as they attempt to continue their studies beyond high school. My Brooklyn high school was no different. It did not have enough counselors to help students with the...Read More

Is Tennessee moving its weakest teachers to early, non-tested grades? New research says yes.

Tennessee’s education insiders have whispered for years that some elementary school principals were moving their least effective teachers to critical early grades, which are free of high-stakes tests. That’s despite clear evidence that those years are the most important for preparing students for a lifetime of learning. Now a new study has confirmed that the shift is real. Researchers...Read More

The U.S. Teaching Population Is Getting Bigger, and More Female

Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the...Read More

Higher Pay Leads to Smarter Teachers, Global Study Says

When teachers have higher cognitive skills, their students perform better academically, according to a new study that compared data from 31 countries. And teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely across the world, with teachers in the United States performing worse than the average teacher in numeracy and slightly better than the average in literacy. Similarly, U.S. students perform...Read More