Citing the “new normal” and impending budget cuts, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged state leaders to boost student achievement despite dwindling resources."There is a right way and a wrong way to cut spending, and the most important guiding principle I can offer is to minimize the negative impact on students and seize this opportunity to redirect your spending priorities," Du...
The annual Horizons report by Educause and The New Media Consortium has a pretty good track record identifying technologies that will have a significant impact on education. For example, the 2006 report cited social computing such as Wikipedia, Skype and internet tagging to be technologies that would soon have an immediate impact.So what does the 2011 Horizon Report see as the six technologies ...
In a recent article in Inside Higher Education, transfer expert Marc Cutright of the University of North Texas writes about the growing importance that four-year colleges and universities should place on students transferring from community college. Public colleges, led by community colleges, grant more than a half million associate degrees annually and the number grew by 27% over a decade. But wh...
The nation is consumed by the quest to grant more college degrees. A new report by Douglas Harris and Sara Goldrick-Rab if the University of Wisconsin-Madison offers a look at how to do that cost-effectively.“The (Un)Productivity of American Higher Education: From Cost Disease to Cost-Effectiveness" compares several practices to see which are cost-effective for producing more degrees. The pr...
According to a June poll by First Focus, an advocacy organization dedicated to making children and families a priority in federal policy, 70% of Americans support the DREAM Act. Rallies are occurring all across the country. There is even a hunger strike in Texas to help get the bill passed. In addition, legislators from the six New England states seem to be highly in favor of it. Eight of the regi...
The percentage of state lawmakers who are women will shrink to 23% in 2011, down slightly from almost 25% in 2010, according to a new report by the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).This reverses a trend in which women made up a larger proportion of state legislatures each year back to 2005 when women comprised just over 22%.While New England legislatures have included more women hi...
Average student loan debt grew to an average of $24,000 per student in the Class of 2009, up 6% over the Class of 2008, according to the latest national report from The Project on Student Debt.The report is especially worrisome for New England where all six states have higher student debts levels than the national average. New Hampshire had the second highest debt load in the nation behind Washing...
Employed wives brought home 47% of their family's total earnings in 2009, up from 45% in 2008, according to a new report by the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.That “marks the largest single-year increase in 15 years,” according to the report Wives as Breadwinners: Wives’ Share of Family Earnings Hits Historic High during the Second Year of the Great Recession...
The MacArthur Foundation recently listed its 2010 Fellows on its website. Awardees of the fellowships, sometimes referred to as "genius grants," range from artists and linguists to historians and scientists.Among the 2010 awardees are two educators: high school teacher Amir Abo-Shaeer, a physics teacher and director of Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy in Goleta, Calif., and music educator Sebastian...
