By Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach and Fred Dews. Education is about the future—students learn in schools and other places based on two underlying assumptions: (a) What they learn today will be recalled sometime in the future when the knowledge is needed, and (b) today’s learning will transfer across time, place, and space. More...
Invest in children for better outcomes
Critical thinking for college, career, and citizenship
By Diane F. Halpern. Education is about the future—students learn in schools and other places based on two underlying assumptions: (a) What they learn today will be recalled sometime in the future when the knowledge is needed, and (b) today’s learning will transfer across time, place, and space. More...
Ending global poverty: Education and digital technology
By Laurence Chandy, Adrianna Pita and Rebecca Winthrop. If we think about the progress of getting people out of extreme poverty, it is really impressive. But it is actually a much slower trend then what we have seen in the spread of digital technology. The speed with which mobile phone ownership has spread around the world, access to bank accounts, biometric identification cards, people getting online – these trends are happening even faster. More...
| May 25, 2016 7:00am When is discrimination okay?
By Ben Backes. Earlier this week, the Asian-American Coalition for Education (AACE) filed an official complaint to the U.S. Office for Civil Rights against Yale, Brown, and Dartmouth, accusing the institutions of discrimination against Asian-Americans in their admissions process. More...
Student data privacy: Moving from fear to responsible use
By Brenda Leong. Data has always been an inherent part of the educational process – a child’s age, correlated with her grade level, tracked to specific reading or math skills that align with that grade, measured by grades and tests which rank her according to her peers. More...
Mapping education research and judging influence
By John T. Bruer. Education research is a vast, multi-disciplinary field. In trying to understand it or make judgments about importance, influence, or where the action is, it can be helpful to see the big picture and not be swayed by where we happen to sit in the field. A map of education research derived from citation data can help us see the big picture. More...
A one-sided cost benefit analysis on student debt from the Clinton campaign
By Beth Akers. Hillary Clinton is highlighting the issue of student debt in the wrong way. Her campaign recently published an analysis[1] illustrating how much borrowers would be able to save for retirement if they weren’t paying back student loans, without properly considering the economic benefits of college. More...
Becoming brilliant: Reimagining education for our time
By . The amount of knowledge available in books and online is doubling every two and a half years. The consequence? Even if we knew every bit of information available today, we’d be at a 50 percent deficit by 2018 and 75 percent by 2021! If our education is founded solely on our ability to learn facts, we will not succeed in a Google and Wiki world. More...
What do we mean by breadth of opportunities?
By Esther Care and Kate Anderson. Society as a whole is responsible for the education of its members, and we acknowledge the importance of both the formal education system and the informal education opportunities for learning. The formal system houses certain mechanisms for providing education, particularly the more familiar structures like school. Other mechanisms naturally belong to communities, parents, and society at large and constitute the informal system. Together they constitute the learning ecosystem and fulfill society’s responsibility for education. More...
Student debt isn’t hurting homeownership, free college has greater benefits for the rich, and other findings
By . In September of 2015, Economic Studies launched the first piece in a new Brookings series I edit called Evidence Speaks. Through the publication of weekly reports, the series connects consumers of research on education and social policy with those producing it in its best form. More...