US Chamber of Commerce

The 3 Main Obstacles in the Way of Education Reform

Last year, Adam Gray was named the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year. Despite the honor, Gray, who is in his twenties, was dismissed from his South Boston high school shortly thereafter because of rules that make seniority more important than performance when deciding layoffs. He now teaches at the prestigious Boston Latin.
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Obama to Address Student-Loan Rates

Latching on to rising concern over student-loan debt, President Barack Obama will spend much of the next week urging Congress to stop interest rates on the loans from doubling. The effort will kick off Friday with remarks by Education Secretary Arne Duncan and continue into next week with speeches by Mr. Obama at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Iowa.
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Community Colleges Not Up to 21st-Century Mission, Their Own Report Says

Calling the American dream imperiled, the American Association of Community Colleges issued a report on Saturday intended to galvanize college leaders to transform their institutions for the 21st-century needs of students and the economy. Released here on the opening night of the group's annual conference, the report acknowledges the sector's historic growth and success but also argues that even so, far too many community-college students do not graduate. The study also found employment preparation inadequately connected to the needs of the job market, and a need for two-year colleges to work more closely with high schools and baccalaureate institutions.
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Student Loan Interest Rates Loom as Political Battle

President Obama begins an all-out push on Friday to get Congress to extend the low interest rate on federal student loans, White House officials said, an effort that is likely to become a heated battle along party lines. If Congress fails to act, the interest rate on the loans, which are taken out by nearly eight million students each year, will double on July 1, to 6.8 percent.
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Testing the Teachers

There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing. 
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Obama Administration Seeks to Remake Career-Tech Programs

The largest federal program for high schools—the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education program—would get a major makeover under a proposal that advocates expect the Obama administration to unveil Thursday. The proposal would amount to the administration's vision for reauthorizing the Perkins law, which was funded at $1.14 billion in fiscal year 2012, or about twice as much as the School Improvement Grant program.
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Pricing Your College Choices

A new online tool launched by a federal regulator last week offers students – and check-writing parents – one of the most comprehensive databases on college financing, with price tags on more than 7,500 schools and special calculators that can estimate education benefits for service members. The cost of higher education continues to climb faster than the rate of inflation, and debt related to college expenses in the U.S. has crossed the $1 trillion mark, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is unveiling the college data site.
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Pacing Themselves

The media conglomerate Pearson today announced a partnership with Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana to provide online, self-paced courses that the company says will help Ivy Tech deal with student demand and overcrowding issues in required general education courses. For Pearson, which already sells modules for instructor-led courses, the move represents a further step in the company’s strategy of inserting itself into virtually every area of e-learning short of full degree programs.
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States' Waivers Weak on Extended Learning Time, Report Says

Most of the dozen states that have already gotten wiggle room from the No Child Left Behind Act don't have very good plans in place when it comes to a key piece of the U.S. Department of Education's requirements for turning around low-performing schools: extending learning time, according to a report out by the Center for American Progress today.
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Elite Universities' Online Play

Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have teamed up with a for-profit company to offer free versions of their coveted courses this year to online audiences. By doing so, they join a growing group of top-tier universities that are embracing massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as the logical extension of elite higher education in an increasingly online, global landscape.
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