The free community college movement effectively began in 2014 when Republican Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee signed the Tennessee Promise Scholarship Act, which offered the state’s high school graduates free tuition to attend any two-year public community college or technical college in Tennessee. Communities around the country had been experimenting with free college programs since […] The post What one state learned after a decade of free community college appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

College campuses have become battlegrounds in America’s culture wars, with diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the center of the debate. In at least 20 states, Republican lawmakers are pushing to limit or even ban DEI initiatives at public universities. College Uncovered cohost Kirk Carapezza heads to North Carolina, where rollbacks in DEI are raising concerns. At the […] The post College Uncovered: DEI Backlash appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

BROOKLINE, Mass. — It was a humid, gray morning in July, and most of their peers were spending the summer sleeping late and hanging out with friends. But the 20 rising 10th graders in Lisa Rodriguez’s class at Brookline High School were finishing a lesson on exponents and radicals. As Rodriguez worked with two students […] The post Some schools cut paths to calculus in the name of equity. One group takes the opposite approach appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

Predicting the future is often compared to reading tea leaves. In the case of forecasting what education policies Kamala Harris might pursue as president, though, a more apt analogy might be reading her mind. Frankly it’s anyone’s guess what her education policies would be given how few clues we have. It wasn’t always this way. […] The post OPINION: I’d love to predict what a Kamala Harris presidency might mean for education, but we don’t have enough information appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

If your last name starts with an A, that could mean that you’re also more likely to score an A on a test. But if you’re a Wilson or a Ziegler, you may be suffering from a new slight of the modern age: lower college grades. Grading processes have profoundly changed at colleges and universities […] The post Why an end-of-the alphabet last name could skew your grades appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reprinted with permission. Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter. Sameerah Abdullah sends her three school-aged kids to a cyber charter school for some of the same familiar reasons that other families across the nation do, including the flexibility and personalization. For financial literacy class, they go to […] The post Why thousands of Philly families are switching to cyber charter school appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

We know that children who attend high quality child care programs and elementary schools get off on a much stronger footing in both learning and life. But what about the impact of various other opportunities, like after school clubs, music lessons and sports? This was the question a team of researchers tried to explore over […] The post How the ‘opportunity gap’ impacts success in life appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

Rural young people who aspire to a higher education have long had fewer choices than their urban and suburban counterparts, contributing to far lower rates of college-going. Now many of the universities that serve them are eliminating large numbers of programs and majors. That means the already limited number of options available to rural students […] The post College Uncovered: The Rural Higher Education Blues appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

A quarter of the children in the U.S. are Hispanic, according to the U.S. Census, yet 60 percent of Hispanic families live in child care deserts, areas with an undersupply of child care. Culturally appropriate and accessible Spanish-language child care is tailored to the needs of Hispanic and Latino families, where Spanish is often the […] The post These federal policies support Spanish-language child care appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more

Until she was nine years old, Aisha O’Neil grew up in Zion National Park, where her father was a ranger. “That place raised me just as much as my family,” she said. Her love of the park’s sandstone cliffs and caverns became the bedrock of her passion for the environment, and for securing a future […] The post COLUMN: Education that convinces kids the world isn’t doomed appeared first on The Hechinger Report ..read more