By Michelle Singletary. The plan was to take away a very generous tax break for college savings. It was, I believed, as did so many other college-savings advocates, ill-conceived.
President Barack Obama had proposed taxing the earnings in 529 plans; avoiding these taxes is an advantage that is a huge selling point. To defend the move, the administration pointed out that the plans benefit a lot of high-income families who don’t need the tax break. More...

By Albert R. Hunt. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has buzz. He has impressed conservative activists in Des Moines and is the front-runner for likely Republican Iowa caucus-goers, according to a Bloomberg Politics-Des Moines Register poll published this weekend. More...

By David Wilson. We have been reading for some time now about the demographic shift that was occurring in the nation, but I don't think we in higher education have truly digested the impact it will have on our institutions. Two weeks ago, the Southern Education Foundation released a report, A New Majority, concluding that, for the first time in our history, the majority of students in America who are attending public schools qualify for free and reduced price lunches under a federal program designed to assist the lowest income students. More...

By Mike Watkins. Institutions are happy to provide educated employees for hot careers.
Once upon a time, a high school diploma was more than enough to get a good-paying job.
But as times changed and technology advanced and professions became more specialized, a diploma proved insufficient and the call for higher education was heard loud and clear. More...

By Clement de Chaisemartin. Send a child to a boarding school and they’ll thrive. That’s what many richer families believe when they send their children away to board, and it’s the belief behind a series of programmes set up around the world in the past two decades, aimed at providing places at boarding schools for disadvantaged children. More...

By Misty Adoniou. Handwriting is dead, long live keyboard skills!
So says the Finnish education system. From 2016 handwriting will no longer be taught in Finnish schools. And when a high-performing country like Finland makes an educational move, the rest of us who are slipping down the international ladder of academic performance should at least consider whether there would be any benefit in following in their footsteps. More...

By Nick Butler and Sverre Spoelstra. There can be little doubt that the research environment in universities is changing: it is now less a collegiate community of scholars than a competitive game of winners and losers. This transformation manifests in all sorts of ways, most notably in the rise to prominence of national research audits such as the recent Research Excellence Framework (REF) – the mechanism that provides the backbone for the way UK government spending on science and research in higher education is allocated. More...

By Sally Power. When the new crop of MPs take their seats after the May election, many may know each other from their days at private school or Oxbridge. A new study, published by the Sutton Trust, analysed the education of 260 prospective parliamentary candidates and found that 31% had attended private school and 19% studied at either Oxford or Cambridge. A majority of 55% had attended a Russell Group university. More...

By Kate Reynolds. The thorny issue of what democracy is, what it’s not and whether it is an appropriate system for government has been at the top of the agenda at the start of 2015. At the same time, we are in the lead-up to what’s likely to be a hard-fought and very unpredictable general election campaign. More...

By Gemma Ware. Only a tenth of education reforms carried out around the world since 2008 have been analysed by governments for the impact they have on children’s education.
A new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) think-tank looked at 450 education reforms carried out by its 34 member countries between 2008 and 2014. It found that only one in ten of these reforms were scrutinised for impact. More...