The Performance Gap
The gap – particularly between black and Hispanic students and their white peers – is one of America’s most persistent education problems and is intertwined with nearly every other story on the education beat.
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Education Guide / Issues
New ideas and needs emerge all the time in the education realm – which is what makes it such a rich and challenging beat to cover from a solutions perspective. Here are some examples of current dominant themes — and things to consider when covering them.
The gap – particularly between black and Hispanic students and their white peers – is one of America’s most persistent education problems and is intertwined with nearly every other story on the education beat.
Even as scores of families seek options, it’s not clear they led to a better education, nor is there proof that the infusion of variety and competition is improving the larger system.
Thanks to a growing body of research in neuroscience, child development and economics, the impact of preschool and early childhood education is receiving more attention from policymakers and researchers.
Standards and standardized testing have become two of the most controversial issues in education, especially since the introduction of the nationwide Common Core State Standards in 2010.
In recent years, school districts have increasingly tried to measure good teaching and link it to various preparation approaches. Making sense of the results can be tricky.
An ever-growing universe of technology companies and nonprofits are competing to sell educators on their programs. Some say these innovations can improve educational outcomes, but there isn’t consensus.
Education policy increasingly is focused on access to college for low-income families. This challenge is anchored in two questions: Can students afford the expense, and are they prepared for it?
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“We haven’t conveyed the magnitude of the challenge now before us: to change the brains of most of the world’s children so they can take part in the great human inventions of literacy and numeracy and all the learning and culture that springs from those inventions. Education is at least as essential to individual and cultural survival as energy, medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, transportation and defense. Yet compared with public investments in those elds, we spend almost nothing on research and development in education and, consequently, we know far less about what works and why.”
