education system topic

Trade Schools, Colleges and Universities

Join Over 1.5 Million People We've Introduced to Awesome Schools Since 2001

Trade Schools Home > Articles > Issues in Education

Major Issues in Education: 20 Hot Topics (From Grade School to College)

By Publisher | Last Updated August 14, 2024

In America, issues in education are big topics of discussion, both in the news media and among the general public. The current education system is beset by a wide range of challenges, from cuts in government funding to changes in disciplinary policies—and much more. Everyone agrees that providing high-quality education for our citizens is a worthy ideal. However, there are many diverse viewpoints about how that should be accomplished. And that leads to highly charged debates, with passionate advocates on both sides.

Understanding education issues is important for students, parents, and taxpayers. By being well-informed, you can contribute valuable input to the discussion. You can also make better decisions about what causes you will support or what plans you will make for your future.

This article provides detailed information on many of today's most relevant primary, secondary, and post-secondary education issues. It also outlines four emerging trends that have the potential to shake up the education sector. You'll learn about:

• 13 major issues in education at the K-12 level
• 7 big issues in higher education
• 5 emerging trends in education

13 Major Issues in Education at the K-12 Level

1. Government funding for education

School funding is a primary concern when discussing current issues in education. The American public education system, which includes both primary and secondary schools, is primarily funded by tax revenues. For the 2021 school year, state and local governments provided over 89 percent of the funding for public K-12 schools. After the Great Recession, most states reduced their school funding. This reduction makes sense, considering most state funding is sourced from sales and income taxes, which tend to decrease during economic downturns.

However, many states are still giving schools less cash now than they did before the Great Recession. A 2022 article from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) notes that K-12 education is set to receive the largest-ever one-time federal investment. However, the CBPP also predicts this historic funding might fall short due to pandemic-induced education costs. The formulas that states use to fund schools have come under fire in recent years and have even been the subjects of lawsuits. For example, in 2017, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the legislature's formula for financing schools was unconstitutional because it didn't adequately fund education.

Less funding means that smaller staff, fewer programs, and diminished resources for students are common school problems. In some cases, schools are unable to pay for essential maintenance. A 2021 report noted that close to a quarter of all U.S. public schools are in fair or poor condition and that 53 percent of schools need renovations and repairs. Plus, a 2021 survey discovered that teachers spent an average of $750 of their own money on classroom supplies.

The issue reached a tipping point in 2018, with teachers in Arizona, Colorado, and other states walking off the job to demand additional educational funding. Some of the protests resulted in modest funding increases, but many educators believe that more must be done.

2. School safety

Over the past several years, a string of high-profile mass shootings in U.S. schools have resulted in dozens of deaths and led to debates about the best ways to keep students safe. After 17 people were killed in a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018, 57 percent of teenagers said they were worried about the possibility of gun violence at their school.

Figuring out how to prevent such attacks and save students and school personnel's lives are problems faced by teachers all across America.

Former President Trump and other lawmakers suggested that allowing specially trained teachers and other school staff to carry concealed weapons would make schools safer. The idea was that adult volunteers who were already proficient with a firearm could undergo specialized training to deal with an active shooter situation until law enforcement could arrive. Proponents argued that armed staff could intervene to end the threat and save lives. Also, potential attackers might be less likely to target a school if they knew that the school's personnel were carrying weapons.

Critics argue that more guns in schools will lead to more accidents, injuries, and fear. They contend that there is scant evidence supporting the idea that armed school officials would effectively counter attacks. Some data suggests that the opposite may be true: An FBI analysis of active shooter situations between 2000 and 2013 noted that law enforcement personnel who engaged the shooter suffered casualties in 21 out of 45 incidents. And those were highly trained professionals whose primary purpose was to maintain law and order. It's highly unlikely that teachers, whose focus should be on educating children, would do any better in such situations.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), giving teachers guns is not the answer. In a March 2018 survey , 74 percent of NEA members opposed arming school personnel, and two-thirds said they would feel less safe at work if school staff were carrying guns. To counter gun violence in schools, the NEA supports measures like requiring universal background checks, preventing mentally ill people from purchasing guns, and banning assault weapons.

3. Disciplinary policies

Data from the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights in 2021 suggests that black students face disproportionately high rates of suspension and expulsion from school. For instance, in K-12 schools, black male students make up only 7.7 percent of enrollees but account for over 40% percent of suspensions. Many people believe some teachers apply the rules of discipline in a discriminatory way and contribute to what has been termed the "school-to-prison pipeline." That's because research has demonstrated that students who are suspended or expelled are significantly more likely to become involved with the juvenile justice system.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Education issued guidelines for all public schools on developing disciplinary practices that reduce disparities and comply with federal civil rights laws. The guidelines urged schools to limit exclusionary disciplinary tactics such as suspension and expulsion. They also encourage the adoption of more positive interventions such as counseling and restorative justice strategies. In addition, the guidelines specified that schools could face a loss of federal funds if they carried out policies that had a disparate impact on some racial groups.

Opponents argue that banning suspensions and expulsions takes away valuable tools that teachers can use to combat student misbehavior. They maintain that as long as disciplinary policies are applied the same way to every student regardless of race, such policies are not discriminatory. One major 2014 study found that the racial disparities in school suspension rates could be explained by the students' prior behavior rather than by discriminatory tactics on the part of educators.

In 2018, the Federal Commission on School Safety (which was established in the wake of the school shootings in Parkland, Florida) was tasked with reviewing and possibly rescinding the 2014 guidelines. According to an Education Next survey taken shortly after the announced review, only 27 percent of Americans support federal policies that limit racial disparities in school discipline.

4. Technology in education

Technology in education is a powerful movement that is sweeping through schools nationwide. After all, today's students have grown up with digital technology and expect it to be part of their learning experience. But how much of a role should it play in education?

Proponents point out that educational technology offers the potential to engage students in more active learning, as evidenced in flipped classrooms . It can facilitate group collaboration and provide instant access to up-to-date resources. Teachers and instructors can integrate online surveys, interactive case studies, and relevant videos to offer content tailored to different learning styles. Indeed, students with special needs frequently rely on assistive technology to communicate and access course materials.

But there are downsides as well. For instance, technology can be a distraction. Some students tune out of lessons and spend time checking social media, playing games, or shopping online. One research study revealed that students who multitasked on laptops during class scored 11 percent lower on an exam that tested their knowledge of the lecture. Students who sat behind those multitaskers scored 17 percent lower. In the fall of 2017, University of Michigan professor Susan Dynarski cited such research as one of the main reasons she bans electronics in her classes.

More disturbingly, technology can pose a real threat to student privacy and security. The collection of sensitive student data by education technology companies can lead to serious problems. In 2017, a group called Dark Overlord hacked into school district servers in several states and obtained access to students' personal information, including counselor reports and medical records. The group used the data to threaten students and their families with physical violence.

5. Charter schools and voucher programs

School choice is definitely among the hot topics in education these days. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was a vocal supporter of various forms of parental choice, including charter schools and school vouchers.

Charter schools are funded through a combination of public and private money and operate independently of the public system. They have charters (i.e., contracts) with school districts, states, or private organizations. These charters outline the academic outcomes that the schools agree to achieve. Like mainstream public schools, charter schools cannot teach religion or charge tuition, and their students must complete standardized testing . However, charter schools are not limited to taking students in a certain geographic area. They have more autonomy to choose their teaching methods. Charter schools are also subject to less oversight and fewer regulations.

School vouchers are like coupons that allow parents to use public funds to send their child to the school of their choice, which can be private and may be either secular or religious. In many cases, vouchers are reserved for low-income students or students with disabilities.

Advocates argue that charter schools and school vouchers offer parents a greater range of educational options. Opponents say that they privatize education and siphon funding away from regular public schools that are already financially strapped. The 2018 Education Next survey found that 44 percent of the general public supports charter schools' expansion, while 35 percent oppose such a move. The same poll found that 54 percent of people support vouchers.

6. Common Core

The Common Core State Standards is a set of academic standards for math and language arts that specify what public school students are expected to learn by the end of each year from kindergarten through 12th grade. Developed in 2009, the standards were designed to promote equity among public K-12 students. All students would take standardized end-of-year tests and be held to the same internationally benchmarked standards. The idea was to institute a system that brought all schools up to the same level and allowed for comparison of student performance in different regions. Such standards would help all students with college and career readiness.

Some opponents see the standards as an unwelcome federal intrusion into state control of education. Others are critical of the way the standards were developed with little input from experienced educators. Many teachers argue that the standards result in inflexible lesson plans that allow for less creativity and fun in the learning process.

Some critics also take issue with the lack of accommodation for non-traditional learners. The Common Core prescribes standards for each grade level, but students with disabilities or language barriers often need more time to fully learn the material.

The vast majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards when they were first introduced. Since then, more than a dozen states have either repealed the standards or revised them to align better with local needs. In many cases, the standards themselves have remained virtually the same but given a different name.

And a name can be significant. In the Education Next 2018 survey, a group of American adults was asked whether they supported common standards across states. About 61 percent replied that they did. But when another group was polled about Common Core specifically, only 45 percent said they supported it.

7. Standardized testing

During the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) years, schools—and teachers—were judged by how well students scored on such tests. Schools whose results weren't up to par faced intense scrutiny, and in some cases, state takeover or closure. Teachers' effectiveness was rated by how much improvement their students showed on standardized exams. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which took effect in 2016, removed NCLB's most punitive aspects. Still, it maintained the requirement to test students every year in Grades 3 to 8, and once in high school.

But many critics say that rampant standardized testing is one of the biggest problems in education. They argue that the pressure to produce high test scores has resulted in a teach-to-the-test approach to instruction in which other non-tested subjects (such as art, music, and physical education) have been given short shrift to devote more time to test preparation. And they contend that policymakers overemphasize the meaning of standardized test results, which don't present a clear or complete picture of overall student learning.

8. Teacher salaries

According to 2021-22 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), in most states, teacher pay has decreased over the last several years. However, in some states average salaries went up. It's also important to note that public school teachers generally enjoy pensions and other benefits that make up a large share of their compensation.

But the growth in benefits has not been enough to balance out the overall low wages. An Economic Policy Institute report found that even after factoring in benefits, public-sector teachers faced a compensation penalty of 14.2 percent in 2021 relative to other college graduates.

9. The teaching of evolution

In the U.S., public school originated to spread religious ideals, but it has since become a strictly secular institution. And the debate over how to teach public school students about the origins of life has gone on for almost a century.

Today, Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection is accepted by virtually the entire scientific community. However, it is still controversial among many Americans who maintain that living things were guided into existence. A pair of surveys from 2014 revealed that 98 percent of scientists aligned with the American Association for the Advancement of Science believed that humans evolved. But it also revealed that, overall, only 52 percent of American adults agreed.

Over the years, some states have outright banned teachers from discussing evolution in the classroom. Others have mandated that students be allowed to question the scientific soundness of evolution, or that equal time be given to consideration of the Judeo-Christian notion of divine creation (i.e., creationism).

Some people argue that the theory of intelligent design—which posits that the complexities of living things cannot be explained by natural selection and can best be explained as resulting from an intelligent cause—is a legitimate scientific theory that should be allowed in public school curricula. They say it differs from creationism because it doesn't necessarily ascribe life's design to a supernatural deity or supreme being.

Opponents contend that intelligent design is creationism in disguise. They think it should not be taught in public schools because it is religiously motivated and has no credible scientific basis. And the courts have consistently held that the teaching of creationism and intelligent design promotes religious beliefs and therefore violates the Constitution's prohibition against the government establishment of religion. Still, the debate continues.

10. Teacher tenure

Having tenure means that a teacher cannot be let go unless their school district demonstrates just cause. Many states grant tenure to public school teachers who have received satisfactory evaluations for a specified period of time (which ranges from one to five years, depending on the state). A few states do not grant tenure at all. And the issue has long been mired in controversy.

Proponents argue that tenure protects teachers from being dismissed for personal or political reasons, such as disagreeing with administrators or teaching contentious subjects such as evolution. Tenured educators can advocate for students without fear of reprisal. Supporters also say that tenure gives teachers the freedom to try innovative instruction methods to deliver more engaging educational experiences. Tenure also protects more experienced (and more expensive) teachers from being arbitrarily replaced with new graduates who earn lower salaries.

Critics contend that tenure makes it difficult to dismiss ineffectual teachers because going through the legal process of doing so is extremely costly and time-consuming. They say that tenure can encourage complacency since teachers' jobs are secure whether they exceed expectations or just do the bare minimum. Plus, while the granting of tenure often hinges on teacher evaluations, 2017 research found that, in practice, more than 99 percent of teachers receive ratings of satisfactory or better. Some administrators admit to being reluctant to give low ratings because of the time and effort required to document teachers' performance and provide support for improvement.

11. Bullying

Bullying continues to be a major issue in schools all across the U.S. According to a National Center for Education Statistics study , around 22 percent of students in Grades 6 through 12 reported having been bullied at school, or on their way to or from school, in 2019. That figure was down from 28 percent in 2009, but it is still far too high.

The same study revealed that over 22 percent of students reported being bullied once a day, and 6.3 percent reported experiencing bullying two to ten times in a day. In addition, the percentage of students who reported the bullying to an adult was over 45 percent in 2019.

But that still means that almost 60 percent of students are not reporting bullying. And that means children are suffering.

Bullied students experience a range of emotional, physical, and behavioral problems. They often feel angry, anxious, lonely, and helpless. They are frequently scared to go to school, leading them to suffer academically and develop a low sense of self-worth. They are also at greater risk of engaging in violent acts or suicidal behaviors.

Every state has anti-bullying legislation in place, and schools are expected to develop policies to address the problem. However, there are differences in how each state defines bullying and what procedures it mandates when bullying is reported. And only about one-third of states call for school districts to include provisions for support services such as counseling for students who are victims of bullying (or are bullies themselves).

12. Poverty

Student poverty is a growing problem. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that as of the 2019-2020 school year, low-income students comprised a majority (52 percent) of public school students in the U.S. That represented a significant increase from 2000-2001, when only 38 percent of students were considered low-income (meaning they qualified for free or discounted school lunches).

The numbers are truly alarming: In 39 states, at least 40 percent of public school enrollees were eligible to receive free or reduced-price lunches, and 22 of those states had student poverty rates of 50 percent or more.

Low-income students tend to perform worse in school than their more affluent peers. Studies have shown that family income strongly correlates to student achievement on standardized tests. That may be partly because parents with fewer financial resources generally can't afford tutoring and other enrichment experiences to boost student achievement. In addition, low-income children are much more likely to experience food instability, family turmoil, and other stressors that can negatively affect their academic success.

All of this means that teachers face instructional challenges that go beyond students' desires to learn.

13. Class size

According to NCES data , in the 2017-2018 school year, the average class size in U.S. public schools was 26.2 students at the elementary level and 23.3 students at the secondary level.

But anecdotal reports suggest that today, classrooms commonly have more than 30 students—sometimes as many as 40.

Conventional wisdom holds that smaller classes are beneficial to student learning. Teachers often argue that the size of a class greatly influences the quality of the instruction they are able to provide. Research from the National Education Policy Center in 2016 showed smaller classes improve student outcomes, particularly for early elementary, low-income, and minority students.

Many (but not all) states have regulations in place that impose limits on class sizes. However, those limits become increasingly difficult to maintain in an era of budget constraints. Reducing class sizes requires hiring more teachers and constructing new classrooms. Arguably, allowing class sizes to expand can enable districts to absorb funding cuts without making reductions to other programs such as art and physical education.

7 Big Issues in Higher Education

1. Student loan forgiveness

Here's how the American public education system works: Students attend primary and secondary school at no cost. They have the option of going on to post-secondary training (which, for most students, is not free). So with costs rising at both public and private institutions of higher learning, student loan debt is one of the most prominent issues in education today. Students who graduated from college in 2022 came out with an average debt load of $37,338. As a whole, Americans owe over $1.7 trillion in student loans.

Currently, students who have received certain federal student loans and are on income-driven repayment plans can qualify to have their remaining balance forgiven if they haven't repaid the loan in full after 20 to 25 years, depending on the plan. Additionally, the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program allows qualified borrowers who go into public service careers (such as teaching, government service, social work, or law enforcement) to have their student debt canceled after ten years.

However, potential changes are in the works. The Biden-Harris Administration is working to support students and make getting a post-secondary education more affordable. In 2022, the U.S. Department of Education provided more than $17 billion in loan relief to over 700,000 borrowers. Meanwhile, a growing number of Democrats are advocating for free college as an alternative to student loans.

2. Completion rates

The large number of students who begin post-secondary studies but do not graduate continues to be an issue. According to a National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report , the overall six-year college completion rate for the cohort entering college in 2015 was 62.2 percent. Around 58 percent of students completed a credential at the same institution where they started their studies, and about another 8 percent finished at a different institution.

Completion rates are increasing, but there is still concern over the significant percentage of college students who do not graduate. Almost 9 percent of students who began college in 2015 had still not completed a degree or certificate six years later. Over 22 percent of them had dropped out entirely.

Significant costs are associated with starting college but not completing it. Many students end up weighed down by debt, and those who do not complete their higher education are less able to repay loans. Plus, students miss out on formal credentials that could lead to higher earnings. Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in 2021 students who begin college but do not complete a degree have median weekly earnings of $899. By contrast, associate degree holders have median weekly wages of $963, and bachelor's degree recipients have median weekly earnings of $1,334.

Students leave college for many reasons, but chief among them is money. To mitigate that, some institutions have implemented small retention or completion grants. Such grants are for students who are close to graduating, have financial need, have used up all other sources of aid, owe a modest amount, and are at risk of dropping out due to lack of funds. One study found that around a third of the institutions who implemented such grants noted higher graduation rates among grant recipients.

3. Student mental health

Mental health challenges among students are a growing concern. A survey by the American College Health Association in the spring of 2019 found that over two-thirds of college students had experienced "overwhelming anxiety" within the previous 12 months. Almost 45 percent reported higher-than-average stress levels.

Anxiety, stress, and depression were the most common concerns among students who sought treatment. The 2021 report by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health (CCMH) noted the average number of appointments students needed has increased by 20 percent.

And some schools are struggling to keep up. A 2020 report found that the average student-to-clinician ratio on U.S. campuses was 1,411 to 1. So, in some cases, suffering students face long waits for treatment.

4. Sexual assault

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that more than 75 percent of sexual assaults are not reported to law enforcement, so the actual number of incidents could be much higher.

And the way that colleges and universities deal with sexual assault is undergoing changes. Title IX rules makes sure that complaints of sexual assault or harassment are taken seriously and ensuring the accused person is treated fairly.

Administrators were also required to adjudicate such cases based on a preponderance of evidence, meaning that they had to believe that it was more likely than not that an accused was guilty in order to proceed with disciplinary action. The "clear and convincing" evidentiary standard, which required that administrators be reasonably certain that sexual violence or harassment occurred, was deemed unacceptable.

Critics argued that the guidelines failed to respect the due process rights of those accused of sexual misconduct. Research has found that the frequency of false sexual assault allegations is between two and 10 percent.

In 2017, the Trump administration rescinded the Obama-era guidelines. The intent was to institute new regulations on how schools should handle sexual assault allegations. The changes went into effect on August 14, 2020, defining sexual harassment more narrowly and only requiring schools to investigate formal complaints about on-campus incidents officially filed with designated authorities, such as Title IX coordinators. The updated guidelines also allow schools to use the clear and convincing standard for conviction.

Victims' rights advocates were concerned this approach would deter victims from coming forward and hinder efforts to create safe learning environments.

The Biden administration is expected to release their proposed revisions to Title IX in October 2023 which could see many of the Trump administration changes rescinded.

5. Trigger warnings

The use of trigger warnings in academia is a highly contentious issue. Trigger warnings alert students that upcoming course material contains concepts or images that may invoke psychological or physiological reactions in people who have experienced trauma. Some college instructors provide such warnings before introducing films, texts, or other content involving things like violence or sexual abuse. The idea is to give students advance notice so that they can psychologically prepare themselves.

Some believe that trigger warnings are essential because they allow vulnerable people to prepare for and navigate difficult content. Having trigger warnings allows students with post-traumatic stress to decide whether they will engage with the material or find an alternative way to acquire the necessary information.

Critics argue that trigger warnings constrain free speech and academic freedom by discouraging the discussion of topics that might trigger distressing reactions in some students. They point out that college faculty already provide detailed course syllabi and that it's impossible to anticipate and acknowledge every potential trigger.

In 2015, NPR Ed surveyed more than 800 faculty members at higher education institutions across the U.S. and found that around half had given trigger warnings before bringing up potentially disturbing course material. Most did so on their own initiative, not in response to administrative policy or student requests. Few schools either mandate or prohibit trigger warnings. One notable exception is the University of Chicago, which in 2016 informed all incoming first-year students that it did not support such warnings.

6. College accreditation

In order to participate in federal student financial aid programs, institutions of higher education must be accredited by an agency that is recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. By law, accreditors must consider factors such as an institution's facilities, equipment, curricula, admission practices, faculty, and support services. The idea is to enforce an acceptable standard of quality.

But while federal regulations require accreditors to assess each institution's "success with respect to student achievement," they don't specify how to measure such achievement. Accreditors are free to define that for themselves. Unfortunately, some colleges with questionable practices, low graduation rates, and high student loan default rates continue to be accredited. Critics argue that accreditors are not doing enough to ensure that students receive good value for their money.

7. College rankings

Every year, prospective college students and their families turn to rankings like the ones produced by U.S. News & World Report to compare different institutions of higher education. Many people accept such rankings as authoritative without truly understanding how they are calculated or what they measure.

It's common for ranking organizations to refine their methodologies from year to year and change how they weigh various factors—which means it's possible for colleges to rise or fall in the rankings despite making no substantive changes to their programs or institutional policies. That makes it difficult to compare rankings from one year to the next, since things are often measured differently.

For colleges, a higher ranking can lead to more visibility, more qualified applicants, and more alumni donations (in short: more money). And the unfortunate reality is that some schools outright lie about test scores, graduation rates, or financial information in their quest to outrank their competitors.

Others take advantage of creative ways to game the system. For example, U.S. News looks at the test scores of incoming students at each institution, but it only looks at students who begin in the fall semester. One school instituted a program where students with lower test scores could spend their first semester in a foreign country and return to the school in the spring, thus excluding them from the U.S. News calculations.

Rankings do make useful information about U.S. colleges and universities available to all students and their families. But consumers should be cautious about blindly accepting such rankings as true measures of educational quality.

5 Emerging Trends in Education

1. Maker learning

The maker movement is rapidly gaining traction in K-12 schools across America. Maker learning is based on the idea that you will engage students in learning by encouraging interest-driven problem solving and hands-on activities (i.e., learning by doing). In collaborative spaces, students identify problems, dream up inventions, make prototypes, and keep tinkering until they develop something that makes sense. It's a do-it-yourself educational approach that focuses on iterative trial and error and views failure as an opportunity to refine and improve.

Maker education focuses on learning rather than teaching. Students follow their interests and test their own solutions. For example, that might mean creating a video game, building a rocket, designing historical costumes, or 3D-printing an irrigation system for a garden. It can involve high-tech equipment, but it doesn't have to. Repurposing whatever materials are on hand is an important ideal of the maker philosophy.

There is little hard data available on the maker trend. However, researchers at Rutgers University are currently studying the cognitive basis for maker education and investigating its connection to meaningful learning.

2. Moving away from letter grades

Many education advocates believe that the traditional student assessment models place too much emphasis on standardization and testing. They feel that traditional grading models do not sufficiently measure many of the most prized skills in the 21st-century workforce, such as problem-solving, self-advocacy, and creativity. As a result, a growing number of schools around the U.S. are replacing A-F letter grades with new assessment systems.

Formed in 2017, the Mastery Transcript Consortium is a group of more than 150 private high schools that have pledged to get rid of grade-based transcripts in favor of digital ones that provide qualitative descriptions of student learning as well as samples of student work. Some of the most famous private institutions in America have signed on, including Dalton and Phillips Exeter.

The no-more-grades movement is taking hold in public schools as well. Many states have enacted policies to encourage public schools to use something other than grades to assess students' abilities. It's part of a larger shift toward what's commonly known as mastery-based or competency-based learning, which strives to ensure that students become proficient in defined areas of skill.

Instead of letter grades, report cards may feature phrases like "partially meets the standard" or "exceeds the standard." Some schools also include portfolios, capstone projects, or other demonstrations of student learning.

But what happens when it's time to apply to college? It seems that even colleges and universities are getting on board. At least 85 higher education institutions across New England (including Dartmouth and Harvard) have said that students with competency-based transcripts will not be disadvantaged during the admission process.

3. The rise of micro-credentials

Micro-credentials, also known as digital badges or nanodegrees, are mini qualifications that demonstrate a student's knowledge or skills in a given area. Unlike traditional college degrees that require studying a range of different subjects over a multi-year span, micro-credentials are earned through short, targeted education focused on specific skills in particular fields. They tend to be inexpensive (sometimes even free) and are typically taken online.

Some post-secondary schools are developing micro-credentialing partnerships with third-party learning providers, while other schools offer such solutions on their own. A 2020 Campus Technology article stated 70 percent of higher education institutions offer some type of alternative credentialing.

Micro-credentials can serve as evidence that students have mastered particular skills, but the rigor and market worth of such credentials can vary significantly. Still, they are an increasingly popular way of unbundling content and providing it on demand.

4. Flipped classrooms

A growing number of schools are embracing the notion of flipped learning. It's an instructional approach that reverses the traditional model of the teacher giving a lecture in front of the class, then sending students home to work through assignments that enhance their understanding of the concepts. In flipped learning, students watch lecture videos or read relevant course content on their own before class. Class time is devoted to expanding on the material through group discussions and collaborative learning projects (i.e., doing what was traditionally meant as homework). The instructor is there to guide students when questions or problems arise.

Provided that all students have access to the appropriate technology and are motivated to prepare for each class session, flipped learning can bring a wide range of benefits. For example, it allows students to control their own learning by watching lecture videos at their own pace; they can pause, jot down questions, or re-watch parts they find confusing. The model also encourages students to learn from each other and explore subjects more deeply.

Flipped learning is becoming widespread in all education levels, but it is especially prevalent at the college level. In a 2017 survey , 61 percent of college faculty had used the flipped model in some or all of their classes and another 24% of instructors were considering trying it.

5. Social-emotional learning

There is a growing consensus that schools are responsible for fostering students' social and emotional development and their cognitive skills. Social-emotional learning (SEL) focuses on helping students develop the abilities to identify their strengths, manage their emotions, set goals, show empathy, make responsible decisions, and build and maintain healthy relationships. Research has shown that such skills play a key role in reducing anti-social behavior, boosting academic achievement, and improving long-term health.

Every state has developed SEL competencies at the preschool level. The number of states with such competencies for higher grades is growing.

Explore Your Educational Options

Learning about current issues in education may have brought up some questions that could hold the key to the future you want to build. How do I get the skills I need for my chosen career? How can I learn more about the programs offered at trade schools near me ?

You can get started right here, right now. The search tool below will narrow down the best options based on your zip code. And these vocational schools are eager to provide the information you need to decide on the right fit for you.

Related Articles

Where do you want to study?

What do you want to study?

What's your {{waterMark}} code?

"I recommend using Trade-Schools.net because you can find the program that you are interested in nearby or online. " Trade-Schools.net User

How much does the government spend on education? What percentage of people are college educated? How are kids doing in reading and math?

Table of Contents

What is the current state of education in the us.

How much does the US spend per student?

Public school spending per student

Average teacher salary.

How educated are Americans?

People with a bachelor's degree

Educational attainment by race and ethnicity.

How are kids doing in reading and math?

Proficiency in math and reading

What is the role of the government in education?

Spending on the education system

Agencies and elected officials.

The education system in America is made up of different public and private programs that cover preschool, all the way up to colleges and universities. These programs cater to many students in both urban and rural areas. Get data on how students are faring by grade and subject, college graduation rates, and what federal, state, and local governments spending per student. The information comes from various government agencies including the National Center for Education Statistics and Census Bureau.

During the 2019-2020 school year, there was $15,810 spent on K-12 public education for every student in the US.

Education spending per k-12 public school students has nearly doubled since the 1970s..

This estimate of spending on education is produced by the National Center for Education Statistics. Instruction accounts for most of the spending, though about a third includes support services including administration, maintenance, and transportation. Spending per student varies across states and school districts. During the 2019-2020 school year, New York spends the most per student ($29,597) and Idaho spends the least ($9,690).

During the 2021-2022 school year , the average public school teacher salary in the US was $66,397 .

Instruction is the largest category of public school spending, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Adjusting for inflation, average teacher pay is down since 2010.

In 2021 , 35% of people 25 and over had at least a bachelor’s degree.

Over the last decade women have become more educated than men..

Educational attainment is defined as the highest level of formal education a person has completed. The concept can be applied to a person, a demographic group, or a geographic area. Data on educational attainment is produced by the Census Bureau in multiple surveys, which may produce different data. Data from the American Community Survey is shown here to allow for geographic comparisons.

In 2021 , 61% of the Asian 25+ population had completed at least four years of college.

Educational attainment data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey allows for demographic comparisons across the US.

In 2022, proficiency in math for eighth graders was 26.5% .

Proficiency in reading in 8th grade was 30.8% ., based on a nationwide assessment, reading and math scores declined during the pandemic..

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the only nationally representative data that measures student achievement. NAEP is Congressionally mandated. Tests are given in a sample of schools based on student demographics in a given school district, state, or the US overall. Testing covers a variety of subjects, most frequently math, reading, science, and writing.

In fiscal year 2020, governments spent a combined total of $1.3 trillion on education.

That comes out to $4,010 per person..

USAFacts categorizes government budget data to allocate spending appropriately and to arrive at the estimate presented here. Most government spending on education occurs at the state and local levels rather than the federal.

Government revenue and expenditures are based on data from the Office of Management and Budget, the Census Bureau, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Each is published annually, although due to collection times, state and local government data are not as current as federal data. Thus, when combining federal, state, and local revenues and expenditures, the most recent year for a combined number may be delayed.

SIGN UP FOR THE NEWSLETTER

Keep up with the latest data and most popular content.

• International Peace and Security
• Higher Education and Research in Africa
• Andrew Carnegie Fellows
• Great Immigrants
• Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
• Reporting Requirements
• Modification Requests
• Communications FAQs
• Grants Database
• Philanthropic Resources
• Grantee FAQs
• Grantmaking Highlights
• Past Presidents
• The Gospel of Wealth
• Other Carnegie Organizations
• Andrew Carnegie’s Story
• Governance and Policies
• Media Center

What Changes to the U.S. Education System Are Needed to Support Long-Term Success for All Americans?

With the pandemic deepening inequities that threaten students’ prospects, the vice president of the Corporation’s National Program provides a vision for transforming our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures 

At no point in our nation’s history have we asked so much of our education system as we do today. We ask that our primary and secondary schools prepare all students, regardless of background, for a lifetime of learning. We ask that teachers guide every child toward deeper understanding while simultaneously attending to their social-emotional development. And we ask that our institutions of higher learning serve students with a far broader range of life circumstances than ever before.

We ask these things of education because the future we aspire to requires it. The nature of work and civic participation is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and social media are driving rapid changes in how we interact with each other and what skills hold value. In the world our children will inherit, their ability to adapt, think critically, and work effectively with others will be essential for both their own success and the well-being of society.

At Carnegie Corporation of New York, we focus on supporting people who are in a position to meet this challenge. That includes the full spectrum of educators, administrators, family members, and others who shape young people’s learning experiences as they progress toward and into adulthood. Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

All of our work is geared toward transforming student learning. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for success today call for a vastly different set of learning experiences than may have sufficed in the past. Students must play a more active role in their own learning, and that learning must encompass more than subject-matter knowledge. Preparing all children for success requires greater attention to inclusiveness in the classroom, differentiation in teaching and learning, and universal high expectations.

This transformation needs to happen in higher education as well. A high school education is no longer enough to ensure financial security. We need more high-quality postsecondary options, better guidance for students as they transition beyond high school, and sufficient supports to enable all students to complete their postsecondary programs. Preparing students for lifelong success requires stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and work.

The need for such transformation has become all the more urgent in the face of COVID-19. As with past economic crises, the downturn resulting from the pandemic is likely to accelerate the erosion of opportunities for low-skilled workers with only a high school education. Investments in innovative learning models and student supports are critical to preventing further inequities in learning outcomes. 

An Urgent Call for Advancing Equity 

The 2020–21 school year may prove to be the most consequential in American history. With unfathomable speed, COVID-19 has forced more change in how schools operate than in the previous half century.

What is most concerning in all of this is the impact on the most underserved and historically marginalized in our society: low-income children and students of color. Even before the current crisis, the future prospects of a young person today looked very different depending on the color of her skin and the zip code in which she grew up, but the pandemic exposed and exacerbated long-standing racial and economic inequities. And the same families who are faring worst in terms of disrupted schooling are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn and disproportionately getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying.

Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

Every organization that is committed to educational improvement needs to ask itself what it can do differently to further advance the cause of educational equity during this continuing crisis so that we can make lasting improvements. As we know from past experience, if the goal of equity is not kept front and center, those who are already behind through no fault of their own will benefit the least. If ever there were a time to heed this caution, it is now.

We hope that our nation will approach education with a new sense of purpose and a shared commitment to ensuring that our schools truly work for every child. Whether or not that happens will depend on our resolve and our actions in the coming months. We have the proof points and know-how to transform learning, bolster instruction, and meet the needs of our most disadvantaged students. What has changed is the urgency for doing so at scale.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have. We need to reimagine the systems that shape student learning and put the communities whose circumstances we most need to elevate at the center of that process. We need to recognize that we will not improve student outcomes without building the capacity of the adults who work with them, supporting them with high-quality resources and meaningful opportunities for collaboration and professional growth. We need to promote stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and employment so that all students are prepared for lifelong success.

The pandemic has deepened inequities that threaten students’ prospects. But if we seize this moment and learn from it, if we marshal the necessary resources, we have the potential to transform our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures.

In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?

We Must Learn to Act in New Ways

These are not controversial ideas. In fact, they constitute the general consensus about where American education needs to go. But they also represent a tall order for the people who influence the system. Practically everyone who plays a part in education must learn to act in new ways.

That we have made progress in such areas as high school completion, college-going rates, and the adoption of college- and career-ready standards is a testament to the commitment of those working in the field. But it will take more than commitment to achieve the changes in student learning that our times demand. We can’t expect individuals to figure out what they need to do on their own, nor should we be surprised if they struggle to do so when working in institutional structures designed to produce different outcomes. The transformation we seek calls for much greater coordination and a broader set of allies than would suffice for more incremental changes.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have.

Our best hope for achieving equity and the transformation of student learning is to enhance adults’ ability to contribute to that learning. That means building their capacity while supporting their authentic engagement in promoting a high-quality education for every child. It also means ensuring that people operate within systems that are optimized to support their effectiveness and that a growing body of knowledge informs their efforts.

These notions comprise our overarching strategy for promoting the systems change needed to transform student learning experiences on a large scale. We seek to enhance adult capacity and stakeholder engagement in the service of ensuring that all students are prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century. We also support knowledge development and organizational improvement to the extent that investments in these areas enhance adult capacity, stakeholder engagement, and student experiences.

Five Ways We Invest in the Future of Students

These views on how best to promote systems change in education guide our philanthropic work. The strategic areas of change we focus on are major themes throughout our five investment portfolios. Although they are managed separately and support different types of initiatives, each seeks to address its area of focus from multiple angles. A single portfolio may include grants that build adult capacity, enhance stakeholder engagement, and generate new knowledge.

New Designs to Advance Learning

Preparing all students for success requires that we fundamentally reimagine our nation’s schools and classrooms. Our public education system needs to catch up with how the world is evolving and with what we’ve come to understand about how people learn. That means attending to a broader diversity of learning styles and bringing what happens in school into greater alignment with what happens in the worlds of work and civic life. We make investments to increase the number of innovative learning models that support personalized experiences, academic mastery, and positive youth development. We also make investments that build the capacity of districts and intermediaries to improve learning experiences for all students as well as grants to investigate relevant issues of policy and practice.

Pathways to Postsecondary Success

Lifelong success in the United States has never been more dependent on educational attainment than it is today. Completing some education beyond the 12th grade has virtually become a necessity for financial security and meaningful work. But for that possibility to exist for everyone, we need to address the historical barriers that keep many students from pursuing and completing a postsecondary program, and we must strengthen the options available to all students for education after high school. Through our investments, we seek to increase the number of young people able to access and complete a postsecondary program, with a major focus on removing historical barriers for students who are first-generation college-goers, low-income, or from underrepresented groups. We also look to expand the range of high-quality postsecondary options and to strengthen alignment between K–12, higher education, and the world of work.

Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning

At its core, learning is about the interplay between teachers, students, and content. How teachers and students engage with each other and with their curriculum plays a predominant role in determining what students learn and how well they learn it. That’s not to say that factors outside of school don’t also greatly impact student learning. But the research is clear that among the factors a school might control, nothing outweighs the teaching that students experience. We focus on supporting educators in implementing rigorous college- and career-ready standards in math, science, and English language arts. We make investments to increase the supply of and demand for high-quality curricular materials and professional learning experiences for teachers and administrators.

Public Understanding

As central as they are to the education process, school professionals are hardly the only people with a critical role to play in student learning. Students spend far more time with family and other community members than they do at school. And numerous stakeholders outside of the education system have the potential to strengthen and shape what happens within it. The success of our nation’s schools depends on far more individuals than are employed by them. 

We invest in efforts to engage families and other stakeholders as active partners in supporting equitable access to high-quality student learning. We also support media organizations and policy research groups in building awareness about key issues related to educational equity and improvement.

Integration, Learning, and Innovation

Those of us who work for change in education need a new set of habits to achieve our vision of 21st-century learning. It will take more than a factory-model mindset to transform our education system into one that prepares all learners for an increasingly complex world. We must approach this task with flexibility, empathy for the people involved, and an understanding of how to learn from what’s working and what’s not. We work to reduce the fragmentation, inefficiencies, and missteps that often result when educational improvement strategies are pursued in isolation and without an understanding of the contexts in which they are implemented. Through grants and other activities, we build the capacity of people working in educational organizations to change how they work by emphasizing systems and design thinking, iteration, and knowledge sharing within and across organizations.

Two recent surveys by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gallup offer insights into how our education system can better help all Americans navigate job and career choices

Join Us in This Ambitious Endeavor

Our approach of supporting multiple stakeholders by pulling multiple levers is informed by our deep understanding of the system we’re trying to move. American education is a massive, diverse, and highly decentralized enterprise. There is no mechanism by which we might affect more than superficial change in many thousands of communities. The type of change that is needed cannot come from compliance alone. It requires that everyone grapple with new ideas.

We know from our history of promoting large-scale improvements in American education that advancements won’t happen overnight or as the result of one kind of initiative. Our vision for 21st-century education will require more than quick wins and isolated successes. Innovation is essential, and a major thrust of our work involves the incubation and dissemination of new models, resources, and exemplars. But we must also learn to move forward with the empathy, flexibility, and systems thinking needed to support people in making the transition. Novel solutions only help if they can be successfully implemented in different contexts.

Only a sustained and concerted effort will shift the center of gravity of a social enterprise that involves millions of adults and many tens of millions of young people. The challenge of philanthropy is to effect widespread social change with limited resources and without formal authority. This takes more than grantmaking. At the Corporation, we convene, communicate, and form coalitions. We provide thought leadership, issue challenges, and launch new initiatives. Through these multifaceted activities, we maximize our ability to forge, share, and put into practice powerful new ideas that build a foundation for more substantial changes in the future.

We encourage everyone who plays a role in education to join us in this work. Our strategy represents more than our priorities as a grantmaker. It conveys our strong beliefs about how to get American education to where it needs to be. The more organizations and individuals we have supporting those who are working to provide students with what they need, the more likely we are to succeed in this ambitious endeavor. 

LaVerne Evans Srinivasan is the vice president of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s National Program and the program director for Education.

TOP: Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, a lower-school substitute teacher works from her home in Arlington, Virginia, on April 1, 2020. Her role in the school changed significantly due to the pandemic. Whereas she previously worked part-time to support teachers when they needed to be absent from the classroom, amid COVID-19 she now helps teachers to build skills with new digital platforms so they can continue to teach in the best way for their students and their families. (Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

Whether you call it digital, information, news, visual, or media literacy — it is vital for civic engagement and democracy

But what will happen to Birmingham City Schools and other districts when federal relief ends this September? 

Four of the biggest problems facing education—and four trends that could make a difference

Eduardo velez bustillo, harry a. patrinos.

In 2022, we published, Lessons for the education sector from the COVID-19 pandemic , which was a follow up to,  Four Education Trends that Countries Everywhere Should Know About , which summarized views of education experts around the world on how to handle the most pressing issues facing the education sector then. We focused on neuroscience, the role of the private sector, education technology, inequality, and pedagogy.

Unfortunately, we think the four biggest problems facing education today in developing countries are the same ones we have identified in the last decades .

1. The learning crisis was made worse by COVID-19 school closures

Low quality instruction is a major constraint and prior to COVID-19, the learning poverty rate in low- and middle-income countries was 57% (6 out of 10 children could not read and understand basic texts by age 10). More dramatic is the case of Sub-Saharan Africa with a rate even higher at 86%. Several analyses show that the impact of the pandemic on student learning was significant, leaving students in low- and middle-income countries way behind in mathematics, reading and other subjects.  Some argue that learning poverty may be close to 70% after the pandemic , with a substantial long-term negative effect in future earnings. This generation could lose around $21 trillion in future salaries, with the vulnerable students affected the most.

2. Countries are not paying enough attention to early childhood care and education (ECCE)

At the pre-school level about two-thirds of countries do not have a proper legal framework to provide free and compulsory pre-primary education. According to UNESCO, only a minority of countries, mostly high-income, were making timely progress towards SDG4 benchmarks on early childhood indicators prior to the onset of COVID-19. And remember that ECCE is not only preparation for primary school. It can be the foundation for emotional wellbeing and learning throughout life; one of the best investments a country can make.

3. There is an inadequate supply of high-quality teachers

Low quality teaching is a huge problem and getting worse in many low- and middle-income countries.  In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, the percentage of trained teachers fell from 84% in 2000 to 69% in 2019 . In addition, in many countries teachers are formally trained and as such qualified, but do not have the minimum pedagogical training. Globally, teachers for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects are the biggest shortfalls.

4. Decision-makers are not implementing evidence-based or pro-equity policies that guarantee solid foundations

It is difficult to understand the continued focus on non-evidence-based policies when there is so much that we know now about what works. Two factors contribute to this problem. One is the short tenure that top officials have when leading education systems. Examples of countries where ministers last less than one year on average are plentiful. The second and more worrisome deals with the fact that there is little attention given to empirical evidence when designing education policies.

To help improve on these four fronts, we see four supporting trends:

1. Neuroscience should be integrated into education policies

Policies considering neuroscience can help ensure that students get proper attention early to support brain development in the first 2-3 years of life. It can also help ensure that children learn to read at the proper age so that they will be able to acquire foundational skills to learn during the primary education cycle and from there on. Inputs like micronutrients, early child stimulation for gross and fine motor skills, speech and language and playing with other children before the age of three are cost-effective ways to get proper development. Early grade reading, using the pedagogical suggestion by the Early Grade Reading Assessment model, has improved learning outcomes in many low- and middle-income countries. We now have the tools to incorporate these advances into the teaching and learning system with AI , ChatGPT , MOOCs and online tutoring.

2. Reversing learning losses at home and at school

There is a real need to address the remaining and lingering losses due to school closures because of COVID-19.  Most students living in households with incomes under the poverty line in the developing world, roughly the bottom 80% in low-income countries and the bottom 50% in middle-income countries, do not have the minimum conditions to learn at home . These students do not have access to the internet, and, often, their parents or guardians do not have the necessary schooling level or the time to help them in their learning process. Connectivity for poor households is a priority. But learning continuity also requires the presence of an adult as a facilitator—a parent, guardian, instructor, or community worker assisting the student during the learning process while schools are closed or e-learning is used.

To recover from the negative impact of the pandemic, the school system will need to develop at the student level: (i) active and reflective learning; (ii) analytical and applied skills; (iii) strong self-esteem; (iv) attitudes supportive of cooperation and solidarity; and (v) a good knowledge of the curriculum areas. At the teacher (instructor, facilitator, parent) level, the system should aim to develop a new disposition toward the role of teacher as a guide and facilitator. And finally, the system also needs to increase parental involvement in the education of their children and be active part in the solution of the children’s problems. The Escuela Nueva Learning Circles or the Pratham Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) are models that can be used.

3. Use of evidence to improve teaching and learning

We now know more about what works at scale to address the learning crisis. To help countries improve teaching and learning and make teaching an attractive profession, based on available empirical world-wide evidence , we need to improve its status, compensation policies and career progression structures; ensure pre-service education includes a strong practicum component so teachers are well equipped to transition and perform effectively in the classroom; and provide high-quality in-service professional development to ensure they keep teaching in an effective way. We also have the tools to address learning issues cost-effectively. The returns to schooling are high and increasing post-pandemic. But we also have the cost-benefit tools to make good decisions, and these suggest that structured pedagogy, teaching according to learning levels (with and without technology use) are proven effective and cost-effective .

4. The role of the private sector

When properly regulated the private sector can be an effective education provider, and it can help address the specific needs of countries. Most of the pedagogical models that have received international recognition come from the private sector. For example, the recipients of the Yidan Prize on education development are from the non-state sector experiences (Escuela Nueva, BRAC, edX, Pratham, CAMFED and New Education Initiative). In the context of the Artificial Intelligence movement, most of the tools that will revolutionize teaching and learning come from the private sector (i.e., big data, machine learning, electronic pedagogies like OER-Open Educational Resources, MOOCs, etc.). Around the world education technology start-ups are developing AI tools that may have a good potential to help improve quality of education .

After decades asking the same questions on how to improve the education systems of countries, we, finally, are finding answers that are very promising.  Governments need to be aware of this fact.

To receive weekly articles,  sign-up here  

Get updates from Education for Global Development

Thank you for choosing to be part of the Education for Global Development community!

Your subscription is now active. The latest blog posts and blog-related announcements will be delivered directly to your email inbox. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Consultant, Education Sector, World Bank

Senior Adviser, Education

Join the Conversation

• Share on mail
• comments added

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player
• Subscribe to NPR Ed Newsletter

A teenage girl wearing a face mask, head scarf and long black robe, listens to a math teacher at a tutoring center in Kabul. The center was established by a women's rights activist to circumvent a Taliban ban on girls attending secondary school. The activist said she has informal permission by Taliban authorities to run the center as long as teenage girls abide by a strict dress code. Diaa Hadid/NPR hide caption

Goats and Soda

Many afghan men believe in women's rights. but they're afraid to speak out.

August 16, 2024 • Men rarely speak out to protest the Taliban's stripping away of the rights of girls and women. A new study finds that many believe those lost rights should be restored.

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik testifies during a House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing about antisemitism on college campuses on April 17 in Washington, D.C. Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Columbia University President Minouche Shafik resigns after 'period of turmoil'

August 14, 2024 • Shafik is the third Ivy League university president to leave her job following criticism over how she has handled campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas war. She held the job for 13 months.

COLUMBIA'S PRESIDENT RESIGNS

Police and security stand outside the Center for Jewish Living at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in early November, after antisemitic threats left the community on edge. Matt Burkhartt/Getty Images hide caption

A former Cornell student is sentenced to 21 months for threatening to kill Jews

August 13, 2024 • Patrick Dai admitted to posting anonymous threats against Jews on campus in October. His lawyer argued it was a "misguided attempt to highlight Hamas’ genocidal beliefs and garner support for Israel.”

Starting Your Podcast: A Guide For Students

New to podcasting? Don't panic.

The transition back to school can be overwhelming for kids. Explaining the changes and setting expectations can help them feel more prepared to take on the year. Urbazon/Getty Images hide caption

Snuggles, pep talks and love notes: 10 ways to calm your kid’s back-to-school jitters

August 12, 2024 • Teachers, pediatricians and child development experts share loving, creative advice on how to ease children (and their parents!) into a new school year.

Pro-Palestinian students and activists face police officers after protesters were evicted from the library at Portland State University in Portland, Ore., in May. John Rudoff/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

With a new semester, colleges brace for more antiwar protests from students

August 12, 2024 • The Israel-Hamas war has prompted some of the most volatile campus protests in decades. This summer, student organizers are rethinking strategies, as are counter-protesters and college administrators.

The statue of Alma Mater on the campus of Columbia University in New York. Diane Bondareff/AP hide caption

3 Columbia deans resign over texts that 'touched on ... antisemitic tropes'

August 8, 2024 • The three deans were texting sarcastic and mocking messages about students’ complaints of antisemitism during a panel discussion on Jewish life on campus last May.

Since the new FAFSA launched on Dec. 30, 2023, the form has only been available for short periods of time. That changed this week. On Tuesday, the U.S. Education Department said applicants will now have 24-hour access. Screenshot by NPR hide caption

The rollout for the updated FAFSA application has been delayed — again

August 8, 2024 • The availability of last year's application, and subsequently students' aid packages, was delayed several times while the Department of Education worked to update the form.

Back-to-school season can still be an opportunity for a refresh, even if you're not headed back to the classroom. Maria Korneeva/Getty Images/Moment RF hide caption

6 ways grown-ups can recreate that fresh, buzzy feeling of a new school year

August 6, 2024 • Refreshing ideas that harness the excitement of going back to school -- like learning new things, packing a school lunch and playing at recess -- updated for the adult version of you. 

Bloomington High School South science teacher Kirstin Milks leads a lesson on human-caused climate change and technologies that could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Chris Elberfeld/WFYI hide caption

In the face of global warming, students are dreaming up a better climate future

August 5, 2024 • With heat waves and extreme weather becoming more and more common, one Indiana teacher wants to empower her students with information, and the creative freedom to imagine big ideas.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson led a news conference with Republican committee chairs, including House Education and the Workforce Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, on April 30 to decry reports of antisemitism happening at university protests across the country. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Columbia University threatened with subpoenas over U.S. House antisemitism investigation

August 1, 2024 • A Republican-led House committee says it would issue subpoenas to Columbia University to get documents it requested months ago for its investigation into reports of antisemitism on campus.

He has a badge and a gun — and he investigates school truancy

July 31, 2024 • When students miss lots of school without an excuse, it’s known as truancy — and in Madison County, Ind., it can lead to a visit from truancy investigator Mitch Carroll.

In 1994, young people wearing "True Love Waits" T-shirts hammer pledge cards stating they'll abstain from sex until marriage into the lawn of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Richard Ross hide caption

30 years later, the evangelical purity movement still impacts sex education

July 31, 2024 • In 1994 on the National Mall, thousands of American teens pledged abstinence until marriage. The movement it created has influenced sex education in schools to this day.

30 years of Abstinence pledge

Code Switch

'not a badge of honor': how book bans affect indigenous literature.

July 31, 2024 • For some authors, finding their book on a "banned" list can feel almost like an accolade, putting them right there with classics like The Bluest Eye and To Kill a Mockingbird. But the reality is, most banned books never get the kind of recognition or readership that the most famous ones do.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland testifies during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources hearing in May. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images/Getty Images North America hide caption

Nearly a thousand children died at Indian boarding schools funded by the U.S.

July 30, 2024 • The investigation into abuse and mistreatment of Native children at the boarding schools for more than a century proposes $23 billion in funding aimed at healing.

[EMBARGO] Carrillo/Federal Indian Boarding Schools Final Report

Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., listens during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dec. 7, 2023, in Washington. Mariam Zuhaib/AP hide caption

Robert Menendez Elementary School will change its name after the senator's conviction

July 28, 2024 • The New Jersey school will drop the Menendez name it adopted in 2013 now that the senator was found guilty of bribery.

Barb Ibrahim, left, drove half an hour to visit Amber and Matt Luman and their new daughter, Esserley. Ibrahim, a nurse of more than 30 years, is part of new program in Oregon that offers free home visits from a registered nurse for any family with a newborn. Cory Turner/NPR hide caption

Babies don’t come with instructions. But in Oregon, they now come with a nurse

July 23, 2024 • A new state program offers any family with a new baby a no-cost visit at home with a trained nurse. It’s Oregon’s response to the country’s dismal infant and maternal mortality rates.

Turner/ Newborn Home Visits

An ACT Assessment preparation book is seen in 2014 in Springfield, Ill. Seth Perlman/AP hide caption

The science section of the ACT exam will now be optional

July 19, 2024 • Students can now opt between several versions of the test: the ACT core exam (which includes reading, math and English), the ACT plus writing, the ACT plus science or the ACT plus science and writing.

President Biden speaks about student loan debt, April 8, 2024, in Madison, Wis. Evan Vucci/AP hide caption

Federal appeals court blocks remainder of Biden's student debt relief plan

July 19, 2024 • The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a motion for an administrative stay filed by a group of Republican-led states seeking to invalidate the administration's entire student loan forgiveness plan.

‎ LA Johnson/NPR hide caption

35,000 more public servants see their student loan balances reduced or erased

July 18, 2024 • The Biden administration announced $1.2 billion in student loan forgiveness for borrowers who work in public service, including as firefighters, social workers and teachers.

Six-year-old Sam and his mother, Tabitha, attend a virtual class with Sam’s teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing. Cindy Elizabeth/for NPR hide caption

As discrimination complaints soar, parents of disabled students wait for help

July 16, 2024 • The Education Department is handling record numbers of discrimination cases, including those involving disability. The backlog leaves some families waiting for help.

More students with disabilities are facing discrimination in schools

Parents, students, and staff of Chino Valley Unified School District hold up signs in favor of protecting LGBTQ+ policies at Don Antonio Lugo High School, in Chino, Calif., in June 2023. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law Monday barring school districts from passing policies that require schools to notify parents if their child asks to change their gender identification. Anjali Sharif-Paul/The Orange County Register/AP hide caption

California bans school rules requiring parents notification of child's pronoun change

July 16, 2024 • The law, which is the first in the nation, bans school rules requiring school staff to disclose a student's gender identity or sexual orientation to any other person without the child's permission.

Janet Johnson receives her college diploma from Kent Devereaux, president of Goucher College. Jenny Abamu/for NPR hide caption

Women don’t have equal access to college in prison. Here’s why

July 15, 2024 • Many people in prison rely on federal Pell Grants to pay for college courses. But in most states, women's prisons offer less access to Pell-eligible classes than men’s prisons do.

A Pennsylvania school district is grappling with the fallout caused after middle school students created fake TikTok accounts to impersonate their teachers and post lewd and offensive messages. Getty Images hide caption

A school district in Pa. says students made fake TikTok accounts to target teachers

July 9, 2024 • Middle school students in the town of Malvern impersonated teachers and posted crude and offensive language on fake accounts. The superintendent called the incidents a "gross misuse of social media."

A sign stands in front of part of the Johns Hopkins Hospital complex in Baltimore. Patrick Semansky/AP hide caption

Bloomberg gives $1 billion to Hopkins to make tuition free for most medical students

July 9, 2024 • Most students pursuing medical degrees at Johns Hopkins University will receive free tuition, thanks to a $1 billion gift from businessman Michael Bloomberg's philanthropic organization.

How do we reinvent education? These TED Talks explore the latest thinking — from teachers, parents, kids — on how to build a better school.

Video playlists about Education

The Butterfly Effect: Talks from the TEDinArabic Summit

A love letter to science

The pursuit of curiosity and understanding

The most popular TED Talks in Hindi

Talks about education.

What are warts — and how do you get rid of them?

The most dangerous elements on the periodic table

What the oil industry doesn’t want you to know

Why does hitting your funny bone feel so horrible?

Why are scientists shooting mushrooms into space?

The weirdest (and coolest) tongues in the animal kingdom

3 hard-won lessons from an educator during a crisis

The Greek myth of the serpent’s curse

Why fish are better at breathing than you are

What happens in your body during a miscarriage?

Could we build a miniature sun on Earth?

How do doctors determine what stage of cancer you have?

A street librarian's quest to bring books to everyone

The secret behind how Chinese characters work

What really happened to Oedipus?

“where you from?” An ode to the Bronx

Exclusive articles about education, even gritty people get discouraged, here’s one way to make solar energy more affordable and accessible: share it with your neighbors, how to raise emotionally intelligent kids.

• Our Mission

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2020

We reviewed hundreds of educational studies in 2020 and then highlighted 10 of the most significant—covering topics from virtual learning to the reading wars and the decline of standardized tests.

In the month of March of 2020, the year suddenly became a whirlwind. With a pandemic disrupting life across the entire globe, teachers scrambled to transform their physical classrooms into virtual—or even hybrid—ones, and researchers slowly began to collect insights into what works, and what doesn’t, in online learning environments around the world.

Meanwhile, neuroscientists made a convincing case for keeping handwriting in schools, and after the closure of several coal-fired power plants in Chicago, researchers reported a drop in pediatric emergency room visits and fewer absences in schools, reminding us that questions of educational equity do not begin and end at the schoolhouse door.

1. To Teach Vocabulary, Let Kids Be Thespians

When students are learning a new language, ask them to act out vocabulary words. It’s fun to unleash a child’s inner thespian, of course, but a 2020 study concluded that it also nearly doubles their ability to remember the words months later.

Researchers asked 8-year-old students to listen to words in another language and then use their hands and bodies to mimic the words—spreading their arms and pretending to fly, for example, when learning the German word flugzeug , which means “airplane.” After two months, these young actors were a remarkable 73 percent more likely to remember the new words than students who had listened without accompanying gestures. Researchers discovered similar, if slightly less dramatic, results when students looked at pictures while listening to the corresponding vocabulary. 

It’s a simple reminder that if you want students to remember something, encourage them to learn it in a variety of ways—by drawing it , acting it out, or pairing it with relevant images , for example.

2. Neuroscientists Defend the Value of Teaching Handwriting—Again

For most kids, typing just doesn’t cut it. In 2012, brain scans of preliterate children revealed crucial reading circuitry flickering to life when kids hand-printed letters and then tried to read them. The effect largely disappeared when the letters were typed or traced.

More recently, in 2020, a team of researchers studied older children—seventh graders—while they handwrote, drew, and typed words, and concluded that handwriting and drawing produced telltale neural tracings indicative of deeper learning.

“Whenever self-generated movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated,” the researchers explain, before echoing the 2012 study: “It also appears that the movements related to keyboard typing do not activate these networks the same way that drawing and handwriting do.”

It would be a mistake to replace typing with handwriting, though. All kids need to develop digital skills, and there’s evidence that technology helps children with dyslexia to overcome obstacles like note taking or illegible handwriting, ultimately freeing them to “use their time for all the things in which they are gifted,” says the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity.

3. The ACT Test Just Got a Negative Score (Face Palm)

A 2020 study found that ACT test scores, which are often a key factor in college admissions, showed a weak—or even negative —relationship when it came to predicting how successful students would be in college. “There is little evidence that students will have more college success if they work to improve their ACT score,” the researchers explain, and students with very high ACT scores—but indifferent high school grades—often flamed out in college, overmatched by the rigors of a university’s academic schedule.

Just last year, the SAT—cousin to the ACT—had a similarly dubious public showing. In a major 2019 study of nearly 50,000 students led by researcher Brian Galla, and including Angela Duckworth, researchers found that high school grades were stronger predictors of four-year-college graduation than SAT scores.

The reason? Four-year high school grades, the researchers asserted, are a better indicator of crucial skills like perseverance, time management, and the ability to avoid distractions. It’s most likely those skills, in the end, that keep kids in college.

4. A Rubric Reduces Racial Grading Bias

A simple step might help undercut the pernicious effect of grading bias, a new study found: Articulate your standards clearly before you begin grading, and refer to the standards regularly during the assessment process.

In 2020, more than 1,500 teachers were recruited and asked to grade a writing sample from a fictional second-grade student. All of the sample stories were identical—but in one set, the student mentions a family member named Dashawn, while the other set references a sibling named Connor.

Teachers were 13 percent more likely to give the Connor papers a passing grade, revealing the invisible advantages that many students unknowingly benefit from. When grading criteria are vague, implicit stereotypes can insidiously “fill in the blanks,” explains the study’s author. But when teachers have an explicit set of criteria to evaluate the writing—asking whether the student “provides a well-elaborated recount of an event,” for example—the difference in grades is nearly eliminated.

5. What Do Coal-Fired Power Plants Have to Do With Learning? Plenty

When three coal-fired plants closed in the Chicago area, student absences in nearby schools dropped by 7 percent, a change largely driven by fewer emergency room visits for asthma-related problems. The stunning finding, published in a 2020 study from Duke and Penn State, underscores the role that often-overlooked environmental factors—like air quality, neighborhood crime, and noise pollution—have in keeping our children healthy and ready to learn.

At scale, the opportunity cost is staggering: About 2.3 million children in the United States still attend a public elementary or middle school located within 10 kilometers of a coal-fired plant.

The study builds on a growing body of research that reminds us that questions of educational equity do not begin and end at the schoolhouse door. What we call an achievement gap is often an equity gap, one that “takes root in the earliest years of children’s lives,” according to a 2017 study . We won’t have equal opportunity in our schools, the researchers admonish, until we are diligent about confronting inequality in our cities, our neighborhoods—and ultimately our own backyards.

6. Students Who Generate Good Questions Are Better Learners

Some of the most popular study strategies—highlighting passages, rereading notes, and underlining key sentences—are also among the least effective. A 2020 study highlighted a powerful alternative: Get students to generate questions about their learning, and gradually press them to ask more probing questions.

In the study, students who studied a topic and then generated their own questions scored an average of 14 percentage points higher on a test than students who used passive strategies like studying their notes and rereading classroom material. Creating questions, the researchers found, not only encouraged students to think more deeply about the topic but also strengthened their ability to remember what they were studying.

There are many engaging ways to have students create highly productive questions : When creating a test, you can ask students to submit their own questions, or you can use the Jeopardy! game as a platform for student-created questions.

7. Did a 2020 Study Just End the ‘Reading Wars’?

One of the most widely used reading programs was dealt a severe blow when a panel of reading experts concluded that it “would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

In the 2020 study , the experts found that the controversial program—called “Units of Study” and developed over the course of four decades by Lucy Calkins at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project—failed to explicitly and systematically teach young readers how to decode and encode written words, and was thus “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.”

The study sounded the death knell for practices that de-emphasize phonics in favor of having children use multiple sources of information—like story events or illustrations—to predict the meaning of unfamiliar words, an approach often associated with “balanced literacy.” In an internal memo obtained by publisher APM, Calkins seemed to concede the point, writing that “aspects of balanced literacy need some ‘rebalancing.’”

8. A Secret to High-Performing Virtual Classrooms

In 2020, a team at Georgia State University compiled a report on virtual learning best practices. While evidence in the field is "sparse" and "inconsistent," the report noted that logistical issues like accessing materials—and not content-specific problems like failures of comprehension—were often among the most significant obstacles to online learning. It wasn’t that students didn’t understand photosynthesis in a virtual setting, in other words—it was that they didn’t find (or simply didn't access) the lesson on photosynthesis at all.

That basic insight echoed a 2019 study that highlighted the crucial need to organize virtual classrooms even more intentionally than physical ones. Remote teachers should use a single, dedicated hub for important documents like assignments; simplify communications and reminders by using one channel like email or text; and reduce visual clutter like hard-to-read fonts and unnecessary decorations throughout their virtual spaces.

Because the tools are new to everyone, regular feedback on topics like accessibility and ease of use is crucial. Teachers should post simple surveys asking questions like “Have you encountered any technical issues?” and “Can you easily locate your assignments?” to ensure that students experience a smooth-running virtual learning space.

9. Love to Learn Languages? Surprisingly, Coding May Be Right for You

Learning how to code more closely resembles learning a language such as Chinese or Spanish than learning math, a 2020 study found—upending the conventional wisdom about what makes a good programmer.

In the study, young adults with no programming experience were asked to learn Python, a popular programming language; they then took a series of tests assessing their problem-solving, math, and language skills. The researchers discovered that mathematical skill accounted for only 2 percent of a person’s ability to learn how to code, while language skills were almost nine times more predictive, accounting for 17 percent of learning ability.

That’s an important insight because all too often, programming classes require that students pass advanced math courses—a hurdle that needlessly excludes students with untapped promise, the researchers claim.

10. Researchers Cast Doubt on Reading Tasks Like ‘Finding the Main Idea’

“Content is comprehension,” declared a 2020 Fordham Institute study , sounding a note of defiance as it staked out a position in the ongoing debate over the teaching of intrinsic reading skills versus the teaching of content knowledge.

While elementary students spend an enormous amount of time working on skills like “finding the main idea” and “summarizing”—tasks born of the belief that reading is a discrete and trainable ability that transfers seamlessly across content areas—these young readers aren’t experiencing “the additional reading gains that well-intentioned educators hoped for,” the study concluded.

So what works? The researchers looked at data from more than 18,000 K–5 students, focusing on the time spent in subject areas like math, social studies, and ELA, and found that “social studies is the only subject with a clear, positive, and statistically significant effect on reading improvement.” In effect, exposing kids to rich content in civics, history, and law appeared to teach reading more effectively than our current methods of teaching reading. Perhaps defiance is no longer needed: Fordham’s conclusions are rapidly becoming conventional wisdom—and they extend beyond the limited claim of reading social studies texts. According to Natalie Wexler, the author of the well-received 2019 book  The Knowledge Gap , content knowledge and reading are intertwined. “Students with more [background] knowledge have a better chance of understanding whatever text they encounter. They’re able to retrieve more information about the topic from long-term memory, leaving more space in working memory for comprehension,” she recently told Edutopia .

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Prehistoric and primitive cultures

• Mesopotamia
• North China
• The Hindu tradition
• The introduction of Buddhist influences
• Classical India
• Indian influences on Asia
• Xi (Western) Zhou (1046–771 bce )
• Dong (Eastern) Zhou (770–256 bce )
• Qin autocracy (221–206 bce )
• Scholarship under the Han (206 bce –220 ce )
• Introduction of Buddhism
• Ancient Hebrews
• Education of youth
• Higher education
• The institutions
• Physical education
• The primary school
• Secondary education
• Early Roman education
• Roman modifications
• Education in the later Roman Empire
• Ancient Persia
• Elementary education
• Professional education
• Early Russian education: Kiev and Muscovy
• Influences on Muslim education and culture
• Aims and purposes of Muslim education
• Organization of education
• Major periods of Muslim education and learning
• Influence of Islamic learning on the West
• From the beginnings to the 4th century
• From the 5th to the 8th century
• The Irish and English revivals
• The cultural revival under Charlemagne and his successors
• Influences of the Carolingian renaissance abroad
• Education of the laity in the 9th and 10th centuries
• Monastic schools
• Urban schools
• New curricula and philosophies
• Thomist philosophy
• The Italian universities
• The French universities
• The English universities
• Universities elsewhere in Europe
• General characteristics of medieval universities
• Lay education and the lower schools
• The foundations of Muslim education
• The Mughal period
• The Tang dynasty (618–907 ce )
• The Song (960–1279)
• The Mongol period (1206–1368)
• The Ming period (1368–1644)
• The Manchu period (1644–1911/12)
• The ancient period to the 12th century
• Education of the warriors
• Education in the Tokugawa era
• Effect of early Western contacts
• The Muslim influence
• The secular influence
• Early influences
• Emergence of the new gymnasium
• Nonscholastic traditions
• Dutch humanism
• Juan Luis Vives
• The early English humanists
• Luther and the German Reformation
• The English Reformation
• The French Reformation
• The Calvinist Reformation
• The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation
• The legacy of the Reformation
• The new scientism and rationalism
• The Protestant demand for universal elementary education
• The pedagogy of Ratke
• The pedagogy of Comenius
• The schools of Gotha
• Courtly education
• The teaching congregations
• Female education
• The Puritan reformers
• Royalist education
• The academies
• John Locke’s empiricism and education as conduct
• Giambattista Vico, critic of Cartesianism
• The condition of the schools and universities
• August Hermann Francke
• Johann Julius Hecker
• The Sensationists
• The Rousseauists
• National education under enlightened rulers
• Spanish and Portuguese America
• French Québec
• New England
• The new academies
• The middle colonies
• The Southern colonies
• Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces.
• The social and historical setting
• The pedagogy of Pestalozzi
• The influence of Pestalozzi
• The pedagogy of Froebel
• The kindergarten movement
• The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
• The Herbartians
• Other German theorists
• French theorists
• Spencer’s scientism
• Humboldt’s reforms
• Developments after 1815
• Girls’ schools
• The new German universities
• Development of state education
• Elementary Education Act
• Secondary and higher education
• The educational awakening
• Education for females
• New Zealand
• Education under the East India Company
• Indian universities
• The Meiji Restoration and the assimilation of Western civilization
• Establishment of a national system of education
• The conservative reaction
• Establishment of nationalistic education systems
• Promotion of industrial education
• Social and historical background
• Influence of psychology and other fields on education
• Traditional movements
• Progressive education
• Child-centred education
• Scientific-realist education
• Social-reconstructionist education
• Major trends and problems
• Early 19th to early 20th century
• Education Act of 1944
• The comprehensive movement
• Further education
• Imperial Germany
• Weimar Republic
• Nazi Germany
• Changes after World War II
• The Third Republic
• The Netherlands
• Switzerland
• Expansion of American education
• Curriculum reforms
• Federal involvement in local education
• Changes in higher education
• Professional organizations
• Canadian educational reforms
• The administration of public education
• Before 1917
• The Stalinist years, 1931–53
• The Khrushchev reforms
• From Brezhnev to Gorbachev
• Perestroika and education
• The modernization movement
• Education in the republic
• Education under the Nationalist government
• Education under communism
• Post-Mao education
• Communism and the intellectuals
• Education at the beginning of the century
• Education to 1940
• Education changes during World War II
• Education after World War II
• Pre-independence period
• The postindependence period in India
• The postindependence period in Pakistan
• The postindependence period in Bangladesh
• The postindependence period in Sri Lanka
• South Africa
• General influences and policies of the colonial powers
• Education in Portuguese colonies and former colonies
• German educational policy in Africa
• Education in British colonies and former colonies
• Education in French colonies and former colonies
• Education in Belgian colonies and former colonies
• Problems and tasks of African education in the late 20th century
• Colonialism and its consequences
• The second half of the 20th century
• The Islamic revival
• Migration and the brain drain
• The heritage of independence
• Administration
• Primary education and literacy
• Reform trends
• Malaysia and Singapore
• Philippines
• Education and social cohesion
• Education and social conflict
• Education and personal growth
• Education and civil society
• Education and economic development
• Primary-level school enrollments
• Secondary-level school enrollments
• Tertiary-level school enrollments
• Other developments in formal education
• Literacy as a measure of success
• Access to education
• Implications for socioeconomic status
• Social consequences of education in developing countries
• The role of the state
• Social and family interaction
• Alternative forms of education

What was education like in ancient Athens?

How does social class affect education attainment, when did education become compulsory, what are alternative forms of education, do school vouchers offer students access to better education.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• World History Encyclopedia - Education in the Elizabethan Era
• Academia - Return on Education Using the Concept of Opportunity Cost
• National Geographic - Geography
• Table Of Contents

What does education mean?

Education refers to the discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments, as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization .

Beginning approximately at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century, Athens became the first city-state in ancient Greece to renounce education that was oriented toward the future duties of soldiers. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization.

Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment.

While education is not compulsory in practice everywhere in the world, the right of individuals to an educational program that respects their personality, talents, abilities, and cultural heritage has been upheld in various international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966.

Alternative forms of education have developed since the late 20th century, such as distance learning , homeschooling , and many parallel or supplementary systems of education often designated as “nonformal” and “popular.” Religious institutions also instruct the young and old alike in sacred knowledge as well as in the values and skills required for participation in local, national, and transnational societies.

School vouchers have been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Some parents of voucher recipients reported high levels of satisfaction, and studies have found increased voucher student graduation rates. Some studies have found, however, that students using vouchers to attend private schools instead of public ones did not show significantly higher levels of academic achievement. Learn more at ProCon.org.

Should corporal punishment be used in elementary education settings?

Whether corporal punishment should be used in elementary education settings is widely debated. Some say it is the appropriate discipline for certain children when used in moderation because it sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. Others say can inflict long-lasting physical and mental harm on students while creating an unsafe and violent school environment. For more on the corporal punishment debate, visit ProCon.org .

Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in education settings?

Whether dress codes should be implemented and enforced in education settings is hotly debated. Some argue dress codes enforce decorum and a serious, professional atmosphere conducive to success, as well as promote safety. Others argue dress codes reinforce racist standards of beauty and dress and are are seldom uniformly mandated, often discriminating against women and marginalized groups. For more on the dress code debate, visit ProCon.org .

Recent News

education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture . Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture , molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood , and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures , there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers . Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as school and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers. As societies grow more complex, however, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission. The outcome is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context. This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

This article discusses the history of education, tracing the evolution of the formal teaching of knowledge and skills from prehistoric and ancient times to the present, and considering the various philosophies that have inspired the resulting systems. Other aspects of education are treated in a number of articles. For a treatment of education as a discipline, including educational organization, teaching methods, and the functions and training of teachers, see teaching ; pedagogy ; and teacher education . For a description of education in various specialized fields, see historiography ; legal education ; medical education ; science, history of . For an analysis of educational philosophy , see education, philosophy of . For an examination of some of the more important aids in education and the dissemination of knowledge, see dictionary ; encyclopaedia ; library ; museum ; printing ; publishing, history of . Some restrictions on educational freedom are discussed in censorship . For an analysis of pupil attributes, see intelligence, human ; learning theory ; psychological testing .

Education in primitive and early civilized cultures

The term education can be applied to primitive cultures only in the sense of enculturation , which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a relatively fixed sense of cultural continuity and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive cultures.

The purpose of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship , because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive cultures, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy , identification, and imitation . Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community .

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education, postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths , philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

Explore Our Exclusive Report

Trending Topics

Special reports, motivating all students to be stem problem solvers.

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Sign Up & Sign In

EdWeek Market Brief

The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a  9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling . For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.  Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the  2018 World Development Report  (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to  Learning Poverty , and help youth acquire the advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world. 

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in  Learning Poverty  (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated  70%  in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped .  If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling.  These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth.  The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of  US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings  in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss. 

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet.  Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

• Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
• Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
• Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
• Schools are safe and inclusive; and
• Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

• We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children. 
• We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas , those in marginalized and rural communities,  girls and women , displaced populations,  students with disabilities , and other vulnerable groups.
• We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.   
• We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. 
• We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.   

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms.  Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the  average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning.  In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact.  We still need more and better funding for education.  Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

• Education technology  can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity  to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

Accelerating Improvements

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the  Accelerator Program  works with a set of countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.  Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.  

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The  Literacy Policy Package (LPP)   consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development. 

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change. 

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

Strengthening Measurement Systems

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

(1) The  Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

• Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
• Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2)  Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

 Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term. 

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. 

The ongoing  Supporting  Egypt  Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In  Nigeria , the $75 million  Edo  Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST)  project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million  School Sector Development Program  in  Nepal  (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million  Strengthening of State Universities  in  Chile  project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first  Program-for-Results financing in education  was through a $202 million project in  Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million  BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million  Cambodia  Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million  Yemen  Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million  Providing an Education of Quality in  Haiti  project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in  Uzbekistan  had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the  Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project , by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the  Coalition for Foundational Learning  to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning.  The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the  Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank.  ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF:  Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a  Learning Data Compact , a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):   Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4, this partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills  global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities.  It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

Areas of focus.

Data & Measurement

Early Childhood Development

Financing Education

Foundational Learning

Fragile, Conflict & Violent Contexts

Girls’ Education

Inclusive Education

Skills Development

Technology (EdTech)  

Tertiary Education

Initiatives

• Show More +
• Invest in Childcare
• Global Education Policy Dashboard
• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel
• Show Less -

Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It

BROCHURES & FACT SHEETS

Flyer: Education Factsheet - May 2024

Publication: Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective – August 2023

Flyer: Education and Climate Change - November 2022

Brochure: Learning Losses - October 2022

STAY CONNECTED

Human Development Topics

Around the bank group.

Find out what the Bank Group's branches are doing in education

Global Education Newsletter - June 2024

What's happening in the World Bank Education Global Practice? Read to learn more.

Learning Can't Wait: A commitment to education in Latin America and the ...

A new IDB-World Bank report describes challenges and priorities to address the educational crisis.

Human Capital Project

The Human Capital Project is a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

Impact Evaluations

Research that measures the impact of education policies to improve education in low and middle income countries.

Education Videos

Watch our latest videos featuring our projects across the world

Additional Resources

Skills & Workforce Development

Technology (EdTech)

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

Publications

• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

72% of U.S. high school teachers say cellphone distraction is a major problem in the classroom

Some 72% of high school teachers say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom.

U.S. public, private and charter schools in 5 charts

During the 2021-22 school year, 83% of the country’s public, private and charter school students in pre-K through 12th grade attended traditional public schools.

Is College Worth It?

Americans have mixed views on the importance of having a degree. 47% say the cost is worth it only if someone doesn’t have to take out loans.

Half of Latinas Say Hispanic Women’s Situation Has Improved in the Past Decade and Expect More Gains

Government data shows gains in education, employment and earnings for Hispanic women, but gaps with other groups remain.

A quarter of U.S. teachers say AI tools do more harm than good in K-12 education

High school teachers are more likely than elementary and middle school teachers to hold negative views about AI tools in education.

Most Americans think U.S. K-12 STEM education isn’t above average, but test results paint a mixed picture

Just 28% of U.S. adults say America is the best in the world or above average in K-12 STEM education compared with other wealthy nations.

About 1 in 4 U.S. teachers say their school went into a gun-related lockdown in the last school year

59% of public K-12 teachers say they are at least somewhat worried about the possibility of a shooting ever happening at their school.

About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

What Public K-12 Teachers Want Americans To Know About Teaching

Many public K-12 teachers say people should know that teaching is hard job, and that teachers care about students and deserve respect.

What’s It Like To Be a Teacher in America Today?

Public K-12 teachers express low job satisfaction and few are optimistic about the future of U.S. education.

REFINE YOUR SELECTION

• Richard Fry (45)
• Lee Rainie (31)
• Drew DeSilver (21)
• Kim Parker (16)
• D’Vera Cohn (13)
• Katherine Schaeffer (13)
• Amanda Lenhart (10)
• Jens Manuel Krogstad (10)
• Juliana Menasce Horowitz (10)
• Monica Anderson (10)
• Neil G. Ruiz (9)
• Tom Rosentiel (8)
• Cary Funk (7)
• Kiley Hurst (7)
• Brian Kennedy (6)
• Kathryn Zickuhr (6)
• Mark Hugo Lopez (6)
• Anna Brown (5)
• Dana Braga (5)
• John Gramlich (5)
• Kristen Purcell (5)
• A.W. Geiger (4)
• Amanda Barroso (4)
• Andrew Perrin (4)
• Anthony Cilluffo (4)
• Bruce Drake (4)
• Caryle Murphy (4)
• Eileen Patten (4)
• John B. Horrigan (4)
• Kat Devlin (4)
• Laura Silver (4)
• Michael Suh (4)
• Sara Kehaulani Goo (4)
• Abby Budiman (3)
• Amina Dunn (3)
• Chris Baronavski (3)
• Daniel Dockterman (3)
• Emily A. Vogels (3)
• George Gao (3)
• Gretchen Livingston (3)
• Janna Anderson (3)
• Judy Buchanan (3)
• Kristen Bialik (3)
• Linda Friedrich (3)
• Luona Lin (3)
• Meg Hefferon (3)
• Nikki Graf (3)
• Rakesh Kochhar (3)
• Stella Sechopoulos (3)
• Susannah Fox (3)
• Wendy Wang (3)
• Aaron Smith (2)
• Andrea Caumont (2)
• Brooke Auxier (2)
• Carrie Blazina (2)
• Colleen McClain (2)
• Gabriel Borelli (2)
• Hannah Hartig (2)
• J.J. Moncus (2)
• Jan Lauren Boyles (2)
• Jeffrey S. Passel (2)
• Jenn Hatfield (2)
• Jynnah Radford (2)
• Lauren Mora (2)
• Mark Strauss (2)
• Michael Lipka (2)
• Pew Research Center Staff (2)
• Rachel Minkin (2)
• Renee Stepler (2)
• Rich Morin (2)
• Richard Wike (2)
• Ruth Igielnik (2)
• Shannon Greenwood (2)
• Aidan Connaughton (1)
• Alberto F. Cabrera (1)
• Alec Tyson (1)
• Aleksandra Sandstrom (1)
• Alexandra Cahn (1)
• Alissa Scheller (1)
• Amanda Jacklin (1)
• Amy Wells (1)
• Ana Gonzalez-Barrera (1)
• Andrew Daniller (1)
• Andy Cerda (1)
• Ariana Rodriguez-Gitler (1)
• B. Lindsey Lowell (1)
• Becka A. Alper (1)
• Bridget Parker (1)
• Bruce Stokes (1)
• Carolina Aragão (1)
• Carroll Doherty (1)
• Christine Huang (1)
• Christine Tamir (1)
• Chul Lee (1)
• Clara Chen (1)
• Conrad Hackett (1)
• Dalia Fahmy (1)
• Dan Hess (1)
• Danielle Cuddington (1)
• David Masci (1)
• David McClendon (1)
• Felisa Gonzales (1)
• Gabriel Velasco (1)
• J. Baxter Oliphant (1)
• Jacob Poushter (1)
• Janell Fetterolf (1)
• Jeff Diamant (1)
• Jeffrey Gottfried (1)
• Jesse Bennett (1)
• Jessica Vitak (1)
• Jocelyn Kiley (1)
• John Carlo Mandapat (1)
• Katie Simmons (1)
• Khadijah Edwards (1)
• Kristi Walker (1)
• Leslie Davis (1)
• Luis Noe-Bustamante (1)
• Mary Madden (1)
• Max Kalehoff (1)
• Maya Simon (1)
• Meltem Odabaş (1)
• Michael Keegan (1)
• Michelle Faverio (1)
• Mike Graziano (1)
• Mohamad Moslimani (1)
• Nancy Vogt (1)
• Nathan Kommers (1)
• Nick Zanetti (1)
• Oliver Lewis (1)
• Olivia Sidoti (1)
• Paul Taylor (1)
• Pew Research Center: Journalism & Media staff (1)
• Philip Schwadel (1)
• Phillip Connor (1)
• Rebecca Hinze-Pifer (1)
• Risa Gelles-Watnick (1)
• Roberto Suro (1)
• Russell Heimlich (1)
• Sahana Mukherjee (1)
• Sarita Brown (1)
• Scott Swail (1)
• Seth Motel (1)
• Shirin Hakimzadeh (1)
• Sousan Arafeh (1)
• Stephanie Kramer (1)
• Steve Jones (1)
• Ted Van Green (1)
• Travis Mitchell (1)
• Vianney Gómez (1)
• Ziyao Tian (1)

Research Teams

• Social Trends (134)
• Internet and Technology (96)
• Religion (64)
• Race and Ethnicity (60)
• Global Migration and Demography (45)
• Global (43)
• Politics (35)
• Science (27)
• Journalism (17)
• Data Labs (15)
• Pew Research Center (14)
• Methods (13)

901 E St. NW, Suite 300 Washington, DC 20004 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Email Newsletters

ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

© 2024 Pew Research Center

More From Forbes

These five issues are at the heart of all k-12 education policy debates.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

In education, we don't always talk about what we're really talking about.

The next four years offer the prospect of renewed debates about many aspects of public education policy. As we watch this new batch of fireworks launch, it will be useful to remember that virtually all of our debates are the outgrowth of four fundamental issues.

How To Fund Public Education

In the U.S., we like the idea of public education, but we don’t much care for funding it. Our use of real estate taxes to fund education has guaranteed that folks mostly pay for school for their own neighborhood, wealthy or not-so. There are some state-level mechanisms to help equalize that, but not all are effective .

Critics of public education often cite the increased costs of public education , but at least some is the result of slowly, reluctantly, providing better funding for previously underserved populations. And we’re still not there; for Pennsylvania alone, recent estimates are that nearly $5 billion are needed to fully fund all public schools. Sometimes the inequities are between districts, and in some cases, inequities exist within districts (e.g. the Pinellas County district in Florida that first segregated its students, then segregated the dollars that went to them ). Throughout our history, many white citizens have resisted mechanisms that require them to finance education for Black students ( Schoolhouse Burning and Overturning Brown are just two books from 2020 that lay out some of that ugly education history). Segregation of students and of finances has been a problem in our past, and we have not solved it in our present. On top of that layer the fact that some students, for a variety of reasons, simply cost more to educate than others.

Many reform initiatives of the past decades have declared themselves about “making schools better” or “reducing inequity” while the rest of that statement—”without spending more money”—remaining unspoken. The argument is that spending more money won’t help, and while it’s true that spending the money badly will not help, the research is clear— school funding matters when it comes to student success.

Vouchers and charter schools are both attempts to look like we’re addressing educational inequity without actually spending any more money. “Let the money follow the student,” is the slogan, and it completely skips over the question of whether the money is enough. The blanket is not big enough to cover the bed, but school choice advocates argue that by cutting the blanket up, moving the pieces around, and perhaps setting up some extra cots, the too-small blanket will become large enough to cover everyone. Meanwhile, there’s no serious research to indicate that choice schools do more with less .

Best High-Yield Savings Accounts Of September 2023

Best 5% interest savings accounts of september 2023.

The funding issues also affect teachers, because teachers are the major cost in education. So we see frequent attempts to lower labor costs in education. Have Teach for America style staff that turns over every few years. Create pedagogy-in-a-box programs that don’t require a trained teacher to deliver. Replace part or all of the staff with computerized programs—especially shiny new ones with AI. It all cuts costs.

All of it comes back to a fundamental issue. The U.S. system demands a Lexus on a Kia budget, and many of our citizens really don’t want to pay to educate Those Peoples’ children. This desire to do school on the cheap serves to limits the range of solutions considered for every single problem in education. As long as we are unwilling or unable to say that we will pay whatever it takes to create a top-level education system that serves every student, these debates will continue.

Equity and Justice; Race and Religion

We have many, many ideas about equity and justice in this country, with new rounds of old arguments opened in recent years. Under Betsy DeVos, the department began “efficiently” closing out complaints related to race, and reversed Obama-era guidance meant to address racial inequity in school discipline. At the same time, she has shifted focus to what she perceives as a different brand of inequity —that related to religion . Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue has further eroded the wall between church and state and paved the road for more use of taxpayer dollars to fund private, religious schools.

Both of these debates about fairness and justice—religion and race—are roiling in the country right now, and public schools are always a reflection of society. A Biden administration is far more likely to focus on trying to right historic and systemic inequity for BIPOC students, but the Trump administration has installed a wide net of judges who are seen as more sympathetic to conservative causes. We are likely to see initiatives aimed at addressing injustices, both real and perceived, promoted through a variety of avenues.

A nation’s schools don’t exist in a vacuum. Every single argument we have in our world about justice, equity, values, racism, and decency is going to spill over into schools, and that’s going to be reflected in policy debates.

How To Read Students’ Minds

This is a challenge for every policy maker and every classroom teacher—how do you know what students have actually learned?

All of assessment is about trying to design an assessment task that will show us what the student did or did not grasp. The list of factors that can interfere with these acts of hopeful psychic divination is long. The student may not understand the task. The student may simply be distracted or focused on other factors. The student may run afoul of the medium through which she’s supposed to show her stuff; she may have trouble writing papers, or multiple choice questions might throw her. Or the assessment task itself may be poorly designed.

This is a daily challenge for teachers, but it becomes even more troublesome when policy makers start talking about “accountability.” For the past few decades, reformers have wanted to measure both what is in students’ brains and how much of it a particular teacher put there in a particular year. What they’ve settled on is an annual battery of multiple choice questions about reading and math. It is not a great instrument , but policy makers (and people who write about policy) have pretended that it is a real proxy for “student achievement ,” and that they can use special formulae to find out how much teachers contributed to that cranial content.

At all levels, the desire to have a solid answer to “how well is this working,” is natural, right and normal. But just as you can’t know exactly what your in-laws think of you, how your boss really feels about your last conference, and why your partner is still with you, you cannot ever know exactly how much learning has been packed into a students’ head. It’s a question we have to ask over and over, but we can never have absolute faith in the answer we get, and we must keep looking for better ones.

How Much Versus When

We know two things for certain in education. 1) Every student has her own pace and speed to work. 2) The system wants students to acquire certain learning by deadline.

Both are true, and both cannot be the foundation of the system. So we end up telling students, “Your job is to get to Cleveland from New York City. You can use any means of transportation that you have access to—drive, fly, bike, walk if you wish—and take any side trips along the way. But you have to get there in twelve hours.”

From time to time, there is a revolt against the idea of seat time . If a student can grasp the educational goal in three months, why make her sit in class for nine months? And if a student has sat in a seat for nine months, does that really mean she’s learned anything at all? Why not come up with a master list of Things To Learn and as soon as the list is checked off, send the student home?

The debate involves many educational issues, but the current pandemic mess has highlighted one real reason we don’t do this—sending students home from school on a varied and unpredictable schedule creates a whole new set of problems for families.

Nevertheless, the idea of alternatives to seat time will continue to be a debate partly because it has merit and partly because it is an opportunity for many folks to make money. Competency based education , various forms of personalized learning , and any edu-product that can have AI attached to it are hot growth industries. Remote learning during the pandemic has intensified the attention to the seat-time versus mastery debate; expect that debate to keep raging.

What Do Students Need To Know

The advent of Common Core turned “college and career ready” into a well-worn educational cliche, and yet, all these years later, we don’t really know what it means. What exactly does a student need to know or be able to do in order to be college and career ready? Is there a list of knowledge and skills that is essential to every student, whether she intends to be a welder or a physician or a banker or an author or a stay-at-home mom?

Common Core pretended to know the answer, but it was simply the answer that the writers of Common Core thought should be correct. There is no research base, no peer-reviewed study, no repository of scientific evidence to show a list of qualities and capabilities that are a requirement for a good, successful, happy life. We probably can’t even agree on what those three terms mean and if they all belong in that sentence.

We have always argued about what an education is for. There is always pressure for schools to focus on employable skills, to crank out meat widgets and worker bees to better satisfy the needs of business, but that, of course, is precisely the sort of education that wealthy and privileged parents would never settle for when it came to their own children. Shouldn’t education be about more than job training?

What is the point of school? We don’t debate this as often as we should, but our differing opinions about the answer underlie most of our other education policy debates.

These five fundamental issues are the foundation of every K-12 education policy debate, even if they remain unspoken (the “let’s keep it cheap” argument, in particular, is the quiet part that folks rarely want to say out loud). Our choice is to address them directly, or to just haggle at the margins. We’ll see what the future holds.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

• Create Account

Understanding the American Education System

The American education system offers a rich field of choices for international students. There is such an array of schools, programs and locations that the choices may overwhelm students, even those from the U.S. As you begin your school search, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the American education system. Understanding the system will help you narrow your choices and develop your education plan.

The Educational Structure

Primary and secondary school.

Prior to higher education, American students attend primary and secondary school for a combined total of 12 years. These years are referred to as the first through twelfth grades.

Around age six, U.S. children begin primary school, which is most commonly called “elementary school.” They attend five or six years and then go onto secondary school.

Secondary school consists of two programs: the first is “middle school” or “junior high school” and the second program is “high school.” A diploma or certificate is awarded upon graduation from high school. After graduating high school (12th grade), U.S. students may go on to college or university. College or university study is known as “higher education.”

Grading System

Just like American students, you will have to submit your academic transcripts as part of your application for admission to university or college. Academic transcripts are official copies of your academic work. In the U.S. this includes your “grades” and “grade point average” (GPA), which are measurements of your academic achievement. Courses are commonly graded using percentages, which are converted into letter grades.

The grading system and GPA in the U.S. can be confusing, especially for international students. The interpretation of grades has a lot of variation. For example, two students who attended different schools both submit their transcripts to the same university. They both have 3.5 GPAs, but one student attended an average high school, while the other attended a prestigious school that was academically challenging. The university might interpret their GPAs differently because the two schools have dramatically different standards.

Therefore, there are some crucial things to keep in mind:

• You should find out the U.S. equivalent of the last level of education you completed in your home country.
• Pay close attention to the admission requirements of each university and college, as well as individual degree programs, which may have different requirements than the university.
• Regularly meet with an educational advisor or guidance counselor to make sure you are meeting the requirements.

Your educational advisor or guidance counselor will be able to advise you on whether or not you must spend an extra year or two preparing for U.S. university admission. If an international student entered a U.S. university or college prior to being eligible to attend university in their own country, some countries’ governments and employers may not recognize the students’ U.S. education.

Academic Year

The school calendar usually begins in August or September and continues through May or June. The majority of new students begin in autumn, so it is a good idea for international students to also begin their U.S. university studies at this time. There is a lot of excitement at the beginning of the school year and students form many great friendships during this time, as they are all adjusting to a new phase of academic life. Additionally, many courses are designed for students to take them in sequence, starting in autumn and continuing through the year.

The academic year at many schools is composed of two terms called “semesters.” (Some schools use a three-term calendar known as the “trimester” system.) Still, others further divide the year into the quarter system of four terms, including an optional summer session. Basically, if you exclude the summer session, the academic year is either comprised of two semesters or three quarter terms.

The U.S. Higher Education System: Levels of Study

• First Level: Undergraduate

"The American system is much more open. In Hong Kong you just learn what the teacher writes on the board. In America, you discuss the issues and focus more on ideas."

Paolo Kwan from Hong Kong: Studying English and Business Administration at Sierra College in California

A student who is attending a college or university and has not earned a bachelor’s degree, is studying at the undergraduate level. It typically takes about four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. You can either begin your studies in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at a community college or a four-year university or college.

Your first two years of study you will generally be required to take a wide variety of classes in different subjects, commonly known as prerequisite courses: literature, science, the social sciences, the arts, history, and so forth. This is so you achieve a general knowledge, a foundation, of a variety of subjects prior to focusing on a specific field of study.

Many students choose to study at a community college in order to complete the first two years of prerequisite courses. They will earn an Associate of Arts (AA) transfer degree and then transfer to a four-year university or college.

A “major” is the specific field of study in which your degree is focused. For example, if someone’s major is journalism, they will earn a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. You will be required to take a certain number of courses in this field in order to meet the degree requirements of your major. You must choose your major at the beginning of your third year of school.

A very unique characteristic of the American higher education system is that you can change your major multiple times if you choose. It is extremely common for American students to switch majors at some point in their undergraduate studies. Often, students discover a different field that they excel in or enjoy. The American education system is very flexible. Keep in mind though that switching majors may result in more courses, which means more time and money.

• Second Level: Graduate in Pursuit of a Master’s Degree

Presently, a college or university graduate with a bachelor’s degree may want to seriously think about graduate study in order to enter certain professions or advance their career. This degree is usually mandatory for higher-level positions in library science, engineering, behavioral health and education.

Furthermore, international students from some countries are only permitted to study abroad at a graduate level. You should inquire about the credentials needed to get a job in your country before you apply to a postgraduate university in the USA.

A graduate program is usually a division of a university or college. To gain admission, you will need to take the GRE (graduate record examination). Certain master’s programs require specific tests, such as the LSAT for law school, the GRE or GMAT for business school, and the MCAT for medical school.

Graduate programs in pursuit of a master’s degree typically take one to two years to complete. For example, the MBA (master of business administration) is an extremely popular degree program that takes about two years. Other master’s programs, such as journalism, only take one year.

The majority of a master’s program is spent in classroom study and a graduate student must prepare a long research paper called a “master’s thesis” or complete a “master’s project.”

• Third Level: Graduate in Pursuit of a Doctorate Degree

Many graduate schools consider the attainment of a master’s degree the first step towards earning a PhD (doctorate). But at other schools, students may prepare directly for a doctorate without also earning a master’s degree. It may take three years or more to earn a PhD degree. For international students, it may take as long as five or six years.

For the first two years of the program most doctoral candidates enroll in classes and seminars. At least another year is spent conducting firsthand research and writing a thesis or dissertation. This paper must contain views, designs, or research that have not been previously published.

A doctoral dissertation is a discussion and summary of the current scholarship on a given topic. Most U.S. universities awarding doctorates also require their candidates to have a reading knowledge of two foreign languages, to spend a required length of time “in residence,” to pass a qualifying examination that officially admits candidates to the PhD program, and to pass an oral examination on the same topic as the dissertation.

Characteristics of the U.S. Higher Education System

Classroom Environment

Classes range from large lectures with several hundred students to smaller classes and seminars (discussion classes) with only a few students. The American university classroom atmosphere is very dynamic. You will be expected to share your opinion, argue your point, participate in class discussions and give presentations. International students find this one of the most surprising aspects of the American education system.

Each week professors usually assign textbook and other readings. You will be expected to keep up-to-date with the required readings and homework so you can participate in class discussions and understand the lectures. Certain degree programs also require students to spend time in the laboratory.

Professors issue grades for each student enrolled in the course. Grades are usually based upon:

• Each professor will have a unique set of class participation requirements, but students are expected to participate in class discussions, especially in seminar classes. This is often a very important factor in determining a student’s grade.
• A midterm examination is usually given during class time.
• One or more research or term papers , or laboratory reports must be submitted for evaluation.
• Possible short exams or quizzes are given. Sometimes professors will give an unannounced “pop quiz.” This doesn’t count heavily toward the grade, but is intended to inspire students to keep up with their assignments and attendance.
• A final examination will be held after the final class meeting.

Each course is worth a certain number of credits or credit hours. This number is roughly the same as the number of hours a student spends in class for that course each week. A course is typically worth three to five credits.

A full-time program at most schools is 12 or 15 credit hours (four or five courses per term) and a certain number of credits must be fulfilled in order to graduate. International students are expected to enroll in a full-time program during each term.

If a student enrolls at a new university before finishing a degree, generally most credits earned at the first school can be used to complete a degree at the new university. This means a student can transfer to another university and still graduate within a reasonable time.

Types of U.S. higher education

Xujie Zhao from China: Studying Computer Networking at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston

1. State College or University

A state school is supported and run by a state or local government. Each of the 50 U.S. states operates at least one state university and possibly several state colleges. Many of these public universities schools have the name of the state, or the actual word “State” in their names: for example, Washington State University and the University of Michigan.

2. Private College or University

These schools are privately run as opposed to being run by a branch of the government. Tuition will usually be higher than state schools. Often, private U.S. universities and colleges are smaller in size than state schools.

Religiously affiliated universities and colleges are private schools. Nearly all these schools welcome students of all religions and beliefs. Yet, there are a percentage of schools that prefer to admit students who hold similar religious beliefs as those in which the school was founded.

3. Community College

Community colleges are two-year colleges that award an associate’s degrees (transferable), as well as certifications. There are many types of associate degrees, but the most important distinguishing factor is whether or not the degree is transferable. Usually, there will be two primary degree tracks: one for academic transfer and the other prepares students to enter the workforce straightaway. University transfer degrees are generally associate of arts or associate of science. Not likely to be transferrable are the associate of applied science degrees and certificates of completion.

Community college graduates most commonly transfer to four-year colleges or universities to complete their degree. Because they can transfer the credits they earned while attending community college, they can complete their bachelor’s degree program in two or more additional years. Many also offer ESL or intensive English language programs, which will prepare students for university-level courses.

If you do not plan to earn a higher degree than the associate’s, you should find out if an associate’s degree will qualify you for a job in your home country.

4. Institute of Technology

An institute of technology is a school that provides at least four years of study in science and technology. Some have graduate programs, while others offer short-term courses.

Study in the USA ®

Get matched to the best program for you.

Let us know what you're looking for so we can find the best school for you.

Useful Articles

Check Out These Schools

Santa Monica College

$5,000—$10,000 Year

Delaware County Community College

$5,000—$10,000 Semester

Study Mississippi

$1,000—$5,000 Session

Featured Programs

East Los Angeles College

Typical cost per Semester: $5,000—$10,000

Foothill College / De Anza College

Typical cost per Year: $5,000—$10,000

Los Angeles City College

Typical cost per Semester: $1,000—$5,000

Related Stories

Start your U.S. adventure with Study in the USA

Learn About U.S. education financing, housing, and more

TestDEN Ultimate TOEFL Test Prep Online Course

TestDEN's Online TOEFL Test Prep is just what you need to quickly and effectively prepare for the TOEFL test. Since 1998, TestDEN has helped tens of thousands of students raise their TOEFL scores.

A cheaper, faster way to send money abroad

Join over 6 million people and businesses who get a better deal when they send money with the real exchange rate.

Search for Education Loan Options today!

Nomad Credit helps international students search for and compare education loan (student loan) options, including options for students with a US cosigner or those pursuing a graduate degree. The Nomad team will personally help you with your education...

Learn about American culture and education direct from our experts at Study in the USA. Read more

Achieving Your Goal

Admissions and placement testing, beyond the basics, education system in the usa, financing your u.s. education, frequently asked questions, life in the usa, student experiences, for students age 10-18, study in canada, student voices, ask studyusa.com, subscribe to get the latest from study in the usa.

You can unsubscribe at any time.

• Become a Member
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computational Thinking
• Digital Citizenship
• Edtech Selection
• Global Collaborations
• STEAM in Education
• Teacher Preparation
• ISTE Certification
• School Partners
• Career Development
• ISTELive 24
• Solutions Summit
• Leadership Exchange
• 2024 ASCD Leadership Summit
• 2025 ASCD Annual Conference
• Edtech Product Database
• Solutions Network
• Sponsorship & Advertising
• Sponsorship & Advertising
• Learning Library

The Hottest Edtech Topics in 2024

• Professional Development & Well-Being

Each year, we examine the most popular topics at ISTELive to gauge the hottest trends in edtech. It’s interesting and instructive to see how the topics shift each year to reflect the changing times. If you enjoy comparing yearly trends, you can look at our previous lists:

Hottest Edtech Topics 2021

Hottest Edtech Topics 2022

Hottest Edtech Topics 2023

This year, we looked at the number of ISTELive24 sessions tagged with a particular topic, such as equity and inclusion or AR/VR/XR. Many sessions have multiple topics, so there is some overlap between the various categories. We narrowed the topic list down to those that had at least 50 associated sessions, but our hottest topic of the year had a whopping 258 sessions.

Based on this analysis, here are the 2024 hottest edtech trends, in order from least to most popular:

8. Project-based learning

It’s no surprise that PBL continues to be a hot topic for educators, especially those focused on edtech. Tech tools excel at creating immersive experiences for students and allowing them to express their learning outcomes in personal and innovative ways. And, as the technology continues to evolve, the possibilities for curriculum enhancements continue to grow.

With PBL, teachers are engaging students by challenging them to find solutions to real-world problems, encouraging them to work together to solve puzzles and virtual escape rooms , and offering makerspace-style experiences that provide tools for innovation and the chance to build marketable skills.

7. Computer science and computational thinking

The computer science and computational thinking category has made our trend list for the past few years, and we continue to see educators weaving computer science skills into their lessons across subject matter in increasingly creative ways. There’s still a lot of energy dedicated to coding, robotics, and circuits, but now computer science learning is blended with science, history, storytelling projects, and more.

6. Augmented, virtual and extended reality (AR/VR/XR)

Augmented, virtual, and extended realities topped our list last year, but dropped to sixth place at ISTELive24. It was bumped from the top five by a new topic: Innovative Learning Environments. While AR/VR/XR is a subset of this new realm, it’s not surprising that as we move further from the online classrooms of the COVID-19 pandemic, educators are looking for more creative in-person educational opportunities. Still, the use of AR/VR/XR can offer students opportunities to engage in virtual experiences, such as field trips , science experiments, and even historical reenactments that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to access.

5. Innovative learning environments

The ISTELive24 sessions focused on innovative learning environments encompassed both in-person and online learning. They explored neighborhood and community projects, nature walks and gardening, and visits to libraries and maker spaces. They also touched on using robots, deep-diving with open-world gaming like Minecraft, and virtual field trips. Whether in-person or virtual, the trend highlights an interest in engaging students beyond the four walls of classrooms, whether in real-world scenarios or via the use of virtual reality. When paired with the continued focus on project-based learning, the opportunities for creating immersive learning experiences are endless.

4. Equity and inclusion

While social-emotional learning didn’t make the trending list for 2024, equity and inclusion continue to be among the top focus areas in edtech. Engaging and nurturing students across cultures, abilities, learning styles, interests, and identities requires conscious and ongoing effort. In particular, artificial intelligence tools, which are becoming ubiquitous, offer both assistance (such as individualized lesson plans and assessments) and challenges (such as inherent biases in underlying models). With or without AI, educators are still prioritizing efforts to make learning accessible to all students, regardless of their ability or background. This includes girls in STEM initiatives , the use of technology for adaptive and accessible learning, and utilizing technology to support new ELL students.

3. Creativity and curation tools

As the focus continues on project-based learning, authentic assessments, and equity and inclusion, there is an ongoing demand for tools that help students express themselves and share what they’ve learned, which can be a key part of applying or transferring learning. For those educators who don’t have the time or desire to experiment, there are always other teachers who are happy to share their suggestions .

2. Online tools, apps, and resources

This topic is a broad one and has some significant overlap with our number three entry, but it demonstrates the interest educators continue to have in sharing resources and tools. Not only is the landscape of edtech changing at a rapid rate, but teachers and administrators are constantly finding creative ways to utilize available tech resources, whether or not they were intended for educational use. This never-ending stream of new tools may feel overwhelming, but there’s no need to go it alone. Educators can team up to divide and conquer whatever new technology pops up throughout the year.

1. Artificial intelligence

Perhaps not surprisingly, AI rose from second on the list last year to number one this year. The ISTELive24 sessions tagged as AI-related outpaced the next most popular topic by 3 to 1, solidifying its spot as the hottest edtech trend of 2024. But, as we know, AI considerations in education are broad, encompassing everything from ethics and DEI to authentic assessments and customized lesson plans. The addition of AI tools such as transcription, custom chatbots/interactive lessons, text summaries and automated feedback are  changing the face of education and, in some cases, the very nature of roles teachers play and how students learn. Understanding how AI can be used thoughtfully and safely to enhance learning and empower teachers and students alike will obviously be a key area of focus for schools in the year–and years–ahead. And it’s one where ISTE is dedicated to providing robust and nuanced support .

We’re excited to see what trends will develop over the next year. What interesting things are happening in your classroom, school, or community? We hope you’ll bring your expertise and enthusiasm to ISTELive25 .

Image: Shutterstock. 

• artificial intelligence

Trump's Agenda47 on education: Abolish teacher tenure, universal school choice, patriotism

With former teacher Gov. Tim Walz rounding out the Democratic ticket, education could become a talking point in this election.

Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump has laid out his education policy plans in Agenda47 . Separate from the oft-mentioned Project 2025 , Agenda47 covers Trump's official policy platform on issues including crime, health care and immigration. Agenda47 on education proposes 10 ideas for "great schools leading to great jobs" that range from curriculum requirements to preferential funding for schools with internship programs.

This election comes at a pivotal time for educators, says Jon Valant, director at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution. Between the pandemic and the culture wars, teachers have had a rough few years and he says Trump's proposals are unlikely to alleviate the core of those issues.

"All of these are politics more than policy," Valant said in an interview. "My worry is distraction, these types of proposals... they're averting people's eyes from what we should actually be talking about."

The National Education Association , the largest teachers' union in the U.S., has thrown its support behind Vice President Kamala Harris and Walz. NEA President Becky Pringle said Trump's agenda is rooted in his time in office, appointing Betsy DeVos as Education secretary . Pringle said she hopes for an administration that will help teachers get more resources and respect to alleviate the teacher shortage.

"When I started teaching many years ago... I didn't really have a clue every decision that was made about my kids, my classroom, my colleagues, was made by someone who was elected or appointed to some position of power," Pringle said, explaining that they want more educators in public office. "We will have an educator in the White House."

Here are some of Trump's proposed education policies that impact teachers and school systems, as quoted in Agenda47:

Tim Walz career timeline: From high school teacher to Kamala Harris' vice-presidential pick

Give preference to schools that abolish teacher tenure

"To reward good teachers, President Trump will  implement  funding preferences and favorable treatment for states and school districts that abolish teacher tenure for grades K-12, adopt Merit Pay to reward good teachers and give parents the right to vote for the principals who direct their children’s education."

◾ How we got here: Valant called this proposal "an oldie but a goodie for conservative education reform," as it tends to be popular among conservatives. About a decade ago, several states sought to reform teacher tenure by extending the probationary period, but in recent years the push has been more muted as other education battles took the forefront.

◾ In today's context: Valant said union politics come into play here, as teachers unions want to protect tenure as a way to defend against unfounded firings. "This one is primarily the... direct shot at teachers unions," Valant said. He also said teacher recruitment and retention after the last few years is already under stress, and he worries taking away tenure could exacerbate that.

Universal school choice

"President Trump supports universal school choice so that parents can send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values... President Trump commends Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia for leading the American school choice revolution – and he looks forward to working with other states, as well as the U.S. Congress, to provide for universal school choice for every American family."

◾ How we got here: School choice can include a range of policies that give parents the ability to use public money for private school tuition or homeschooling. Valant said there was once bipartisan agreement on limited school choice policies that allowed for charter schools. But more expansive school choice policies, like providing vouchers that give money to parents for their kids to attend private school, dramatically expanded in the last few years. According to Education Week, proponents of school choice say it helps provide another option for kids in underperforming schools.

◾ In today's context: Many outcomes of expanding school choice policies have yet to be seen. But Valant said vouchers are often not enough to cover tuition costs for private schools, and as a result they mostly end up helping relatively wealthy families, many of whom already have kids in private school. He said it could also change the landscape of school enrollment if wealthy kids end up in private schools and low-income kids end up in public schools. "To me...it feels like incredible risk for the damage they may do to their public education systems."

Create a credentialing body to certify patriotic teachers

"President Trump will reinstate the  1776 Commission , which he originally created but was disbanded by Joe Biden on his first day in office, to ensure America’s children learn the truth about their country’s history and the timeless principles of liberty and equality... President Trump will  veto  any effort to weaponize or nationalize civics education. And he will create a credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values and support the American Way of Life."

◾ How we got here: Trump created the 1776 Commission in November of 2020 as part of the backlash to the New York Times' 1619 Project, which examines the history of slavery in the U.S. That backlash also included conservatives passing "critical race theory" curriculum bans, as a key part of the erupting culture wars. The report the commission produced days before Trump left office excused America's history of slavery and undercut the legacy of the civil rights movement.

◾ In today's context: Political messaging on critical race theory and history curriculums seems to have waned in the last year. Valant said creating a new credentialing body would be politically driven, yet derails from traditional conservative values of stripping down government regulation.

Pringle also said this type of body would be politically driven, and this credentialing body could be made up of unqualified appointees.

"They don't know what our kids need, they haven't trained to be able to teach the diverse learning needs and the skills and meet kids where they are, let alone the preparation of educators," Pringle said. "So we know that anything he does has a political nature to it."

Contributing: Kayla Jimenez, Matthew Brown

Judge blocks Texas from releasing this year’s school accountability ratings

The ruling marks the fifth consecutive year Texas families have not received a full picture of their schools’ ratings, which are used to determine how they are performing.

Sign up for The Brief , The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

A Travis County judge has blocked the Texas Education Agency from releasing its ratings of the state’s school districts and campuses for a second year in a row.

Judge Karin Crump on Monday issued a temporary restraining order the same day Texas school districts filed their second lawsuit over the state’s changes to the metrics used to measure their performance. Here’s what you need to know:

The background: How Texas school districts should be graded for their performance has been a contention point since last year.

The ratings that public schools receive are in large part based on how their students do on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness, an annual statewide standardized test that measures students’ understanding of state-mandated core curriculum.

Texas legislators required the TEA to redesign the STAAR test by 2023 so it could be administered almost entirely online and wouldn’t have so many multiple choice questions. Following the redesign, the TEA moved to use computers to grade students’ written answers for the first time this year.

The state also announced last year that schools would need to meet stricter benchmarks to get a good rating on its accountability system, which grades them on an A-F scale. High schools can now only get an A if 88% of their seniors enrolled in college, pursued a non-college career or entered the military. That benchmark used to be at 60%.

The state says stricter benchmarks will mean schools will be required to better prepare students for life after high school. And while Texas school districts agree they would like to raise the number of students who are ready for life after high school, they argue that the state is moving the needle too fast.

Why Texas schools are suing a second time: Texas school district leaders are questioning the validity of STAAR results since an automated system started scoring them this year. They say low scores on STAAR’s reading section are because of the new grading tool, not necessarily because of students’ skills or teachers’ performance.

As a result, school district leaders contend, the STAAR test cannot be trusted to produce fair grades of school districts’ performance. They say TEA needs to get a third party to review the test.

“The STAAR test itself, the changes were fairly radical this time around,” said Nick Maddox, an attorney representing the school districts. “The trend for all school districts is that scores have decreased fairly significantly. We believe that the issue is this test itself.”

Why Texas schools sued the first time: The lawsuit filed Monday is the second legal battle over the A-F rating system.

Last fall, a Travis County judge temporarily blocked the release of the 2023-24 ratings, siding with more than 120 school districts who argued that the TEA had not given them enough notice before introducing stricter college readiness standards. The judge still has to make a final ruling on that lawsuit. The TEA has already said it plans to appeal the judge’s decision.

Families have had five years without a complete set of school ratings. Texas schools and districts did not get ratings in 2020 or 2021 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2022, struggling schools set to get a D or an F got extra relief: Senate Bill 1365 directed TEA to forgo official ratings for those schools, sparing them from any sanctions and giving them time to respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why the A-F accountability system matters: Each school district and school is graded on an A-F scale every year based on their students’ standardized test scores and academic growth. The TEA also looks at their progress on closing racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps.

Parents rely on the rating system to see how successful school districts are in preparing their children and to decide where to enroll their kids.

For schools, a bad grade could mean big consequences. If a failing score leads to families leaving the district, that means less money for the school since state funding is tied to student attendance. Consecutive years with a failing grade could trigger a state takeover , like the one at Houston ISD .

The Texas Tribune partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage.

The full program is now LIVE for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival , happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more. See the full program.

Texans need truth. Help us report it.

Independent Texas reporting needs your support. The Texas Tribune delivers fact-based journalism for Texans, by Texans — and our community of members, the readers who donate, make our work possible. Help us bring you and millions of others in-depth news and information. Will you support our nonprofit newsroom with a donation of any amount?

Support independent Texas news

Become a member. Join today.

Choose an amount or learn more about membership .

Information about the authors

Reporter, Pathways from Education to Employment

[email protected]

Learn about The Texas Tribune’s policies , including our partnership with The Trust Project to increase transparency in news.

Explore related story topics

Courts Public education Education Texas Education Agency

Revisiting education systems transformation: Why understanding the 5 forms of power is essential

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, rebecca winthrop , rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development emily markovich morris , and emily markovich morris fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education ghulam omar qargha ghulam omar qargha fellow - global economy and development , center for universal education.

October 9, 2023

Updated November 3, 2023

This commentary is the third of a three-part series on (1) why it is important to define the purpose of education , (2) how historical forces have interacted to shape the purposes of today’s modern schooling systems , and (3) the role of power in reshaping how the purpose of school is taken up by global education actors in policy and practice.

The recent United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) meetings in New York were a chance for the global education community to revisit, one year later, the debates that took place at the Transforming Education Summit (TES) during UNGA 2022. Many of the 2023 discussions covered the same ground as last year, such as the need for deep transformation to help education systems respond to complex crises—for example, rising economic inequality, growing authoritarianism, pandemics, climate change, human conflicts, racial and gender oppression, and misinformation. But there were also new themes that emerged more strongly this year. For example, generative AI was added to the list of forces the SDGs have to consider (Chat GPT3 was released in November 2022, two months after TES). There was also an increased focus on centering the agency of actors in and from the communities where transformation is taking place. This focus on agency arose frequently—from convenings like 17 Rooms , which brings together actors across government, civil society, and the private sector, to remarks by the UN Leaders. Across many UNGA discussions, the need for new approaches that prioritize the agency of community-based actors—from families to educators to young people—was a recurring theme.The major achievement of the UNGA deliberations was that countries around the world agreed to keep the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as orienting aims rather than, halfway in, abandoning them altogether in the face of headwinds from pandemics, wars, and inflation. Amina Mohammed, the UN Deputy Secretary General, at an education event hosted by Their World , tried to strike a positive note, saying that “games are won in the second half.” But she was clear that the playbook to achieve the SDGs in the seven years left would require “all hands on deck,” and she called on communities around the globe to exert their agency and tell their leaders that “we are not waiting for you.”

To truly make space for communities around the globe to take part in collective decisionmaking in the pursuit of the SDGs, which includes advancing education system transformation, we must collectively address the topic of power. Last year, in connection with TES, the Brookings Center for Universal Education (CUE) co-authored a range of pieces on transforming education systems. In “ Transforming Education Systems: Why, What and How ,” which we co-authored with the Ministry of Basic and Senior Secondary Education of Sierra Leone, we suggested a framework for three main steps that were needed to advance system transformation as distinct from making incremental improvements within systems. Step one, Purpose, is developing a shared vision of the purpose of education across students, communities, educators, and leaders. Step two, Pedagogy, is (re)designing the pedagogical core—namely, the interactions between learners, educators, content, and resources—to deliver on the shared purpose. Step 3, Position, is to align the system components to support the pedagogical core (re)design. We called this the 3Ps of system transformation.

We argue in this blog that the 3Ps model should be expanded to include a fourth P: Power.  Transformation efforts cannot be truly inclusive and equitable without naming and understanding the underlying power dynamics. In a follow-up analysis to our 3Ps model, “ Shared priorities to transform education systems: Mapping recovery and transformation agendas ,” we found different priorities related to transforming education between global actors—such as UN organizations and multilateral funders—and actors inside education systems, such as students, families, educators, and governments. The voices inside the system were twice as likely to prioritize discussions of “purpose and power,” namely, who is at the table when it comes to discussing what education is for and what type of transformed education system we want to enact as a global community. Actors inside the system were identifying a need to shift power to include a more diverse set of voices and to make space for the bottom-up leadership of local actors.

The importance of interrogating current power dynamics was also a recurring discussion during this year at our “ Education Systems Transformation Symposium ,” where participants argued to expand the 3Ps model to include power. Discussions of power in systems transformation is by no means a new topic; it is well debated in many spaces and more recently included as part of global education advocacy and policy discussions, including in the recent piece titled “ The new education story: Three drivers to transform education systems .”

The time has come for us to address power dynamics in education systems transformation. To do so, we need to define the different forms of power and how they manifest in practice.

Considering the five forms of power in discussions on system transformation

Power dynamics are multidimensional and omnipresent in education systems, in research, and in the field of global development. They materialize and manifest in different forms and to different ends, but at the core of power is the capacity to influence or direct actions, behaviors, and decisions. One framework for understanding power as it relates to decisionmaking in education systems planning and transformation is Dr. José Cossa’s “ Five Qualities of Power .” Dr. Cossa’s framework identifies the different intersecting forms of power as regulatory, financial, manipulative, informational, and interpretive. We argue that understanding power in its different forms can help the global education community advance its efforts to address power dynamics in decisionmaking around the process of system transformation. It can also help us see beyond the regulatory and financial forms of power, which are the most frequently analyzed and considered.

The below table summarizes Cossa’s five forms of power and provides examples education systems contend with, ranging from technology to funding relationships to government decisionmaking to what counts as information and evidence.

There are many power dynamics at play as we confront new challenges and opportunities in our sub-national, national, regional, and global education transformation efforts. Analyzing the five forms of power helps us examine how these influence decisions about how to advance systems transformation and what might need to change to support an “all hands on deck” approach. If we are to make space, as the UN Deputy Secretary General has advocated, for communities to have more power to advance the SDGs, understanding the different dimensions of power will be an important first step.

At CUE, we are working closely with our partners from across the world to think deeply about what power means and how it fits into system transformation. As we add a fourth P, Power, to our 3P framework, we will work to be more intentional in acknowledging and disrupting existing power hierarchies in our work.

1: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/a-comprehensive-and-distributed-approach-to-ai-regulation/ 

2: https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/guidance-generative-ai-education-and-research 

Education Access & Equity Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

Douglas N. Harris

August 13, 2024

Rachel M. Perera, Jon Valant, Katharine Meyer

August 12, 2024

Kelly Rosinger, Robert Kelchen, Justin Ortagus, Dominique J. Baker, Mitchell Lingo

August 9, 2024

• The Education Gradebook

DeSantis says state will look into former UF President Sasse’s millions in expenses

• Ana Ceballos Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau

Gov. Ron DeSantis and top Florida Republicans are putting pressure on the state university system’s Board of Governors to look further into the spending habits of former University of Florida President Ben Sasse after a student-run newspaper reported that he’d spent millions in university funds on secretive consulting contracts and jobs for GOP allies.

“We take the stewardship of state funds very seriously and have already been in discussions with leadership at the university and with the Board of Governors to look into the matter,” DeSantis spokesperson Bryan Griffin said in an email to the Times/Herald on Thursday.

The governor’s office made its concerns about Sasse’s use of university funds public on Thursday, shortly after Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis called on university officials to investigate Sasse’s “exorbitant spending.” Patronis said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that the board should “ensure tuition and tax dollars are being properly used.”

Griffin did not disclose what the governor’s office discussed with the board. Florida Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, who oversees the state university system, has not responded to a request seeking comment.

On Friday, Sasse issued a lengthy statement defending his office’s spending. He acknowledged his office directed “substantial funding for a number of important initiatives” that he said had gone through the appropriate approval process. He said the university’s board of trustees had raised no concerns.

“These are initiatives we were running out of the president’s office — and there should be even more — and I am dang proud of each of them, as I believe they will benefit Floridians immensely if brought to fruition,” Sasse said.

Sasse added that he intends to write a memo for the governor’s office and “other interested parties in Tallahassee.”

The interest in Sasse’s spending at the university comes in response to reporting by The Alligator, the student-run newspaper at the university.

According to the report, Sasse’s office spent $17.3 million in his first year in office — up from the $5.6 million spent by former UF President Kent Fuchs last year. The majority of the spending was driven by lucrative contracts with big-name consulting firms and high-salaried, remote positions for Sasse’s former U.S. Senate staff and allies.

Travel expenses during Sasse’s 17-month stint also soared to $633,000 — over 20 times higher than Fuchs’ annual average of $28,000. This was in large part due to Sasse allowing many of his political appointees to work outside of Florida and commute to Gainesville at the university’s expense, The Alligator reported.

Catch up on top stories before rush hour

Become a Times subscriber to get our afternoon newsletter, The Rundown

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Sasse did not deny any of The Alligator’s reporting. Instead, he defended the expenses and largely focused on the success the university has had in growing the Hamilton Center — a relatively new academic center that was initially largely focused on civics courses. In 2022, the Republican-led Legislature and DeSantis approved the creation of the center, which was pushed by an obscure group with ties to conservative and religious groups.

“I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve been building at Hamilton, and gratified by the caliber of folks who’ve agreed to join in this noble effort. Parents: you should send your kids here,” Sasse said. “But guess what? With each new initiative comes new staff — and new investment expenditures. So did we hire some new staff? Yep. And did all of them move immediately to Gainesville full-time? Nope.”

Hello Gator Nation – and other folks interested in higher education reform: I’ve been attending to some family health stuff, so didn’t respond to a report earlier this week about budgeting at the University of Florida. It’s obvious that silence led to confusion and a bunch of… — Ben Sasse (@BenSasse) August 16, 2024

Sasse’s statement is the first time he acknowledged the scrutiny that came from The Alligator’s reporting. Earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Republican from the Florida Panhandle, called Sasse a “terrible university president who never should have been hired.”

“Send him back to Nebraska,” Gaetz said about Sasse, who served as the junior senator for Nebraska prior to taking the job at UF, the state’s flagship university.

Sasse resigned from his post at the university July 31, citing the need to care for his wife , who was recently diagnosed with epilepsy. Fuchs began serving as interim president of the university on Aug. 1.

©2024 Miami Herald. Visit miamiherald.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency LLC

Times/Herald Tallahassee Bureau

MORE FOR YOU

• Advertisement

ONLY AVAILABLE FOR SUBSCRIBERS

The Tampa Bay Times e-Newspaper is a digital replica of the printed paper seven days a week that is available to read on desktop, mobile, and our app for subscribers only. To enjoy the e-Newspaper every day, please subscribe.

Antibodies and Transplantation: Everything You Wanted to Know and More

By Carrie A. Schinstock, M.D.

Antibodies are important, right? Our immune system naturally forms antibodies as a protective response against bacteria and viruses. In the context of transplantation, antibodies are good when they are ready to attack foreign invaders that can lead to illness, but antibodies can also be ready to attack foreign tissue – such as a new kidney transplant. For this reason, antibodies towards different tissue types, otherwise known as anti- human leukocyte antigen donor specific antibodies (anti-HLA DSAs), are measured prior to transplantation. Having a high number of different antibodies towards different tissue types could mean that you are at high risk of rejection if you received a transplant from certain kidney donors. If you have antibodies against your particular kidney donor, the crossmatch will likely be positive (reactive) meaning that transplantation with that donor would be at high risk for rejection.

Finding a Living Donor

A free, self-paced online program with tools to help you find a living kidney donor.

There are some frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the topic of antibodies and transplantation

How did I get antibodies?

Anti-HLA antibodies are formed by the immune system when you are exposed to proteins that appear similar to tissue types. This most commonly occurs in the setting of previous transplantation, pregnancy, or blood transfusion. Occasionally the cause of anti-HLA antibody formation is not known. Unfortunately once you have anti-HLA antibodies, they do not go away on their own. Antibodies can be difficult to remove from the body, although different treatments have been tried. Antibody levels can temporarily increase in the setting of infection, vaccination, or transplantation.

What is a calculated panel reactive antibody or cPRA?

After your antibodies are measured, your health care provider can use them to calculate your PRA. The cPRA estimates the percentage of donors with whom a particular recipient would be incompatible. In other words, it would give you an idea of the percentage of offered kidneys your body would likely reject at the time of transplantation. The cPRA is used in the allocation of kidney and pancreas transplants. Patients with high cPRA levels get priority for transplantation because it is harder to find compatible donor organs in those situations. The good news is that most patients awaiting kidney transplantation have low levels of anti-HLA antibodies, but it is estimated that 9,000 patients on the waitlist have cPRA > 95%.

What are my options if I have a high cPRA?

Although it may take longer to get a transplant if you have high levels of anti-HLA antibodies, do not lose hope. There are many options available for patients with high levels of antibodies. If you have high antibodies, seek out a specialized transplant center to explore these options.

Transplant Lingo 101: A Glossary of Commonly Used Terms

Negative cross-match kidney transplantation: Occasionally the levels of antibodies that you have against a particular kidney donor are very low. This results in a negative crossmatch when your blood and the donor white blood cells are mixed. In this scenario, it can be very safe for you to undergo transplantation and your kidney transplant will likely last for a long time.

Paired donation with a living donor: Because there are many patients with antibodies against their particular donor, pools of incompatible donors and recipients have been formed. Specialized programs and matching systems have been developed to take donors and recipients from these pools in order to create compatible matches. Some of these programs involve specific transplant centers and others are nationally-based. Talk with the staff from your transplant center about their paired donation programs.

Positive cross-match kidney transplantation: Occasionally, it is possible to undergo positive cross-match transplantation. In this case, you have antibodies towards your donor, but it is safe to cautiously undergo transplantation at a specialized transplant center with expertise in this particular area. You may need special treatments such as plasmapheresis and/or intravenous immunoglobulin (IVIG) to undergo this type of transplant. These are treatments that can remove antibodies. In select situations, positive crossmatch kidney transplantation is a better option than remaining on the deceased donor waiting list. For more information, visit a transplant center with expertise in this area.

Clinical trials: Experimental therapies to reduce donor specific antibody and/or treat rejection are available at certain transplant centers. Transplant centers with specialized interests in positive crossmatch kidney transplantation will usually have details about these clinical trials.

Our understanding of anti-HLA donor specific antibody and positive crossmatch kidney transplantation has increased considerably over the last 10 years, and more options are now available to patients with high antibodies than ever before. Researchers continue to work hard to overcome the antibody barriers to successful transplantation. If you have been told you have antibodies, before losing hope that you will never get a transplant, seek consultation with a transplant nephrologist or surgeon who specializes in this area.

To learn more about living donation and transplantation, visit our page on Transplant Education Programs .

How helpful was this content?

Related kidney topics, organ donation, bk virus: what transplant patients need to know, kidney transplant, how to find a transplant center, foods to avoid after transplantation, life with a kidney transplant, becoming a living donor, xenotransplantation, do flu shots work after a kidney transplant, related news and stories.

July 25, 2024

The Future of Artificial Kidneys

July 02, 2024

Increasing Living Kidney Donors in Alabama

December 12, 2018

Modern Family Star Opens Up About Her Kidney Disease and Transplants

September 14, 2017

Selena Gomez Reveals She Had a Kidney Transplant

June 18, 2024

A Son’s Gift. A Wife’s Promise: Fighting for Living Kidney Donors

June 13, 2024

Model Behavior: A Living Kidney Donor Story

June 06, 2024

A Tale of Two Transplants: Family Saves the Day Part 2

May 07, 2024

Expanding Living Donation: Understanding the Key Legislation

May 10, 2024

A Tale of Two Kidney Transplants: Family Saves the Day

Related recipes.

Italian Basil Chicken Sliders

Mexican Antojitos

Pear & Almond Parfait

Grilled Low-Salt Flat Bread

Healthy Chicken Nuggets

Grilled Vegetables

Hearty Chicken Baked Pasta

Indian Coconut Curry Chicken with Chopped Apples

• MD | PhD Program
• Master's Programs
• PhD Programs
• Postdoctoral Fellows
• Residency & Fellowship
• Non-Degree Programs
• Visiting Students
• Campus Life at U-M
• Health & Wellness
• Building Your Community
• Accessibility & Disability
• Departments
• Centers & Institutes
• Interdisciplinary Programs
• Facts & Figures
• Medical School Leadership
• News & Stories
• Requirements
• Interview Day
• Admissions Chats
• AAMC Michigan's 35 Answers
• AAMC Michigan's 10 Financial Aid Answers
• Admitted Students
• Overview & Highlights
• Patient Interaction
• Chief Concern
• Years 3 & 4
• Learning Informatics
• Training Sites
• Leadership Program
• Global Health & Disparities
• Healthcare Innovation
• Health Policy
• Medical Humanities
• Patient Safety & Quality Improvement
• Scientific Discovery
• Doctoring Course
• Evidence-Based Medicine
• Interprofessional Education
• DEIAJ Curriculum
• Language Opportunities
• Curriculum Diagrams
• Grading & Assessments
• Guideline Budget
• Loans & Eligibility
• Financial Aid Application Timeline
• Scholarships & Grants
• Documents & Forms
• Tips & Links
• Tuition Refund Policies
• Consumer Information
• Disbursement & Repayment
• MD Emergency Student Aid Fund
• MD Travel Grant
• Child Care Subsidy
• Residency Interviewing Loans and Resources
• Short-Term University Loan
• Contact the Office of Financial Aid
• Profiles & Demographics
• Culinary Connections
• Students with Disabilities
• Health & Wellbeing
• Arts & Humanities
• Diversity & Health Equity
• Dual Degrees
• More Possibilities
• Commencement
• Available PhD Programs
• Academic & Social Events
• MSTP Fellows
• Application Process
• Application Requirements
• MD | PhD Curriculum
• Undergrad Summer Program
• Contact the MD | PhD Program
• Bioinformatics
• Biological Chemistry
• Cancer Biology
• Cell & Developmental Biology
• Cellular & Molecular Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Health Infrastructures & Learning Systems
• Microbiology & Immunology
• Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology
• Molecular & Cellular Pathology
• Molecular & Integrative Physiology
• Neuroscience
• Pharmacology
• Recruitment Events
• Interview Weekends
• Certificates & Dual Degrees
• Quantitative & Computational Biology Emphasis
• Training Grants
• Facilities & Resources
• Stipend & Benefits
• Professional Development
• Finding a Position
• Funding Your Postdoc
• Hiring Process
• Postdoc Preview
• International Postdocs
• ACGME Fellowships
• Non-Accredited Fellowships
• Postdoctoral Physician Scientist Training
• Salary & Benefits
• Prerequisites
• Visiting Residents & Fellows
• Application Overview & Requirements
• Tuition & Fees
• Timeline & Curriculum
• Information Sessions
• Program Details
• Undergrad Summer Research
• First Days Survival Guide
• Health Services
• Mental Health
• Health, Spirituality & Religion Program
• For Partners & Families
• Things to Do in Ann Arbor
• Getting Around
• Guiding Tools
• Graduate Medical Education
• Office of Continuing Medical Education
• Office of Faculty Affairs & Faculty Development
• Office of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies
• Physician Scientist Education & Training
• Office of Medical Student Education
• Points of Blue
• DEI & Well-Being Initiatives
• Medical Student Program
• Resident Research
• Resident Life
• Categorical Program
• Primary Care Program
• Physician Scientist Training Program
• Ambulatory Care & Primary Care
• Scholarly Activities
• Global Health & Health Disparities
• Recent Graduates
• Fellowships
• Facilities & Spaces
• Exhibiting Opportunities
• Grand Rounds
• Basic & Translational Research
• Clinical Research
• Clinical Experience & Quality
• Faculty Recruitment
• John M. Sheldon Allergy Society
• Patient Care
• Adult Congenital Heart Disease
• Heart Failure & Heart Transplant
• Advanced Imaging
• Interventional Cardiology
• Structural Heart Disease
• Vascular Medicine
• Postdoctoral Cardiovascular Research Training Grant
• Advanced Endoscopy
• T32 Digestive Disease Clinical Research
• Clinical Training
• Transplant Hepatology
• Conferences & Lectures
• Interventional Endoscopy Program
• Academic Primary Care Program
• Geriatric Medicine
• Geriatric-Hospice & Palliative Medicine
• Physician Scientist Training in Age-Related Diseases
• Research Training in Biogerontology Program
• Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center
• Hospice & Palliative Medicine
• Hospice & Palliative Medicine: Pediatric Track
• Palliative Medicine Research Program
• Training Schedule
• Data & Research
• UNITE Collaboration
• Hospital Medicine Fellowship
• Resident Teaching Services
• Clinical & Research Training
• Curriculum & Tracks
• Curriculum & Training
• Basic Research
• Program for Clinical Research in Diabetes Care & Complications
• Program for Translational Research in Diabetes & Metabolic Diseases
• Interventional Nephrology
• Transplant Nephrology
• Basic Science Research
• Outcomes Research
• Critical Care Medicine
• Research Training
• Pathways & Structure
• Research Opportunities
• Resident & Medical Student Education
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
• Critical Care
• Fibrotic Lung Disease
• Health Services, Outcomes, & Policy Program
• Lung Injury & Repair
• Lung Transplantation & Stem Cell Biology Program
• MICReW Workgroup
• Microbiome Program
• Pulmonary Immunity
• Severe Asthma
• Dual Adult-Pediatric Rheumatology Program
• Lupus Research

Training the Next Generation of Internists

Engage in first-class patient care, research and education as you take the next step in your career journey.

Our program is committed to your development as an internist, independent of whether you are heading toward a career in primary care or desire to continue your education with subspecialty training.

The Department of Internal Medicine has had a long tradition of excellence in the tripartite mission of academia including education, patient care, and research. Our faculty members are among the best in the nation and represent a wide array of expertise extending from physician scientists involved in state-of-the-art biomedical investigation to master clinicians who are world-renowned for their clinical expertise. Michigan Medicine is ranked among the top hospitals in the country. The institution attracts diverse patients from across the state and nation.

Residents will not only engage in first-class patient care within the University Hospital, a tertiary care center, but will also spend time in the local Veterans Affairs Hospital which complements the clinical experience tremendously. To further enhance the ambulatory experience of our trainees, the Department of Internal Medicine has successfully developed a series of primary care sites throughout Ann Arbor and the adjoining communities.

As a program, we are deeply committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment that fosters resident wellness in their professional and personal lives. We also remain firmly devoted to combating health inequities in the communities we serve.

If you have any questions about our program or community, please do not hesitate to contact us!

Warmest regards,

John Del Valle, MD, AGAF, FACP Director, Internal Medicine Residency Program University of Michigan Medical School

Resources and information for current residents: Internal Medicine Intranet

Hear from our Assistant Program Director, Dr. Nathan Houchens, about why the Internal Medicine residency program is a premier training program.

Explore information about the interview season, selection process, application requirements and deadlines.

In addition to excellent clinical experiences, our residents participate in an innovative curriculum.

It is our goal for all residents to appreciate the scientific rigor, societal benefits, and professional rewards of thoughtful investigative scholarship.

Explore our training program options designed to meet your career goals.

Resident salaries are negotiated by the House Officers Association (HOA) and are consistent across the institution. Our salaries are very competitive and allow residents flexibility to maintain financial independence.

See who is currently training in the Department of Internal Medicine residency program.

We are committed to increasing diversity, creating equal opportunities for all persons, pursuing deliberate efforts to ensure an inclusive and equitable training environment, and providing optimal care for our diverse community of patients.

We commit to increasing diversity, which is expressed in myriad forms, including race and ethnicity, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, language, culture, national origin, religious commitments, age, (dis)ability status and political perspective.

We commit to working actively to challenge and respond to bias, harassment, and discrimination. We are committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status.

We commit to pursuing deliberate efforts to ensure that our campus is a place where differences are welcomed, different perspectives are respectfully heard and where every individual feels a sense of belonging and inclusion. We know that by building a critical mass of diverse groups on campus and creating a vibrant climate of inclusiveness, we can more effectively leverage the resources of diversity to advance our collective capabilities.

We acknowledge the negative impact of structural and systemic racism on the United States health care system. To ensure an inclusive and equitable training environment, and to provide optimal care for our diverse community of patients, we have an unwavering commitment to racial and social justice.

Explore some of the highlights of our commitment to DEI in residency, including our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, our Compassion Rounds, and our Women's Health Curriculum. Through the residency program, we also offer implicit and structural bias curriculum, holistic recruitment practices and progressive maternity and paternity paid leave.

• Antiracist Book Club - Bimonthly resident led journal club.
• HEARD Curriculum - H.E.A.R.D. stands for Hard, Empathic, Attentive, and Respectful Dialogue. The curriculum focuses on civic discourse, exploring how to have difficult conversations about difficult topics with those of differing opinion.
• Bias in Medical Student Evaluations – Ongoing efforts to educate senior residents and faculty members on concrete steps to mitigate bias when evaluating medical students and residents.
• Residents as Mentors Program - Pairs IM/Med-Peds residents with medical students interested in pursuing careers in these fields.
• Student Outreach - Identifying ways to improve the Internal Medicine clerkship environment for medical students.
• LGBTQ+ Allies - Network of LGBTQ+ identifying residents and allies who host social events and educate residents on the care of LGBTQ+ identifying patients.
• Resident Networking - Connecting residents to faculty mentors based on their shared identities outside of medicine, such as race/ethnicity, gender, religion.
• PSQI - Ongoing projects that address disparities and inequities in our training system.
• Lecture series (Global Health Equity Rounds)
• Visit the Residents and Fellows for Global Health Equity website

A manifestation of the “Implicit and Structural Bias Curriculum,” seeking to promote holistic care via discussion of topics like pain management for patients with IBD.

The team is working on identifying missing topics in the residency curriculum such as abortion or unexpected pregnancies and incorporating them into resident learning sessions.

We treat our residents as whole people and foster a sense of belonging and community as part of our commitment to resident wellness.

Equal Medicine was created in an effort to develop a forum for our residents to discuss and learn about issues of gender disparities in medicine and for residents to gain the skills to address gender bias when they encounter it in clinical settings. 

It also includes curricular programming to support our women residents to develop the skills needed to advance and thrive in academic medicine, seeks to facilitate mentoring relationships, and to celebrate each other’s successes.

Follow Equal Medicine on Twitter: @UMIMEqualMed

Equal Medicine holds several events throughout the year. Examples of past events include:

• Vision Boarding Event
• Annual Negotiation Extravaganza
• Parenting in Medicine
• Infertility and Family Planning in Medicine
• Leading as a Woman in Medicine
• Women in Internal Medicine Procedural Specialties
• Gender Bias in Resident and Faculty Awards
• Bias in Evaluations
• “Afraid of Being Witchy with a B”- Unique Challenges for Women Physicians When Running a Code
• Negotiation Pearls

Gifts will support the residency program creating the future leaders and best in the field of medicine.

Expand your career trajectory in a high-volume academic medical center that also supports and excels in a wide range of basic science, translational and clinical research programs.

• See Training Locations

We find a new reason to love Ann Arbor nearly every day — year-round outdoor activities, cultural experiences, a growing food scene, and a welcoming, family-friendly atmosphere are just a few that come to mind. Explore all that Ann Arbor and our surrounding communities have to offer. 

• Explore Ann Arbor

We transform lives through bold discovery, compassionate care and innovative education.

• Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
• Find a Doctor
• Conditions & Treatments
• Patient & Visitor Guide
• Patient Portal
• Clinical Trials
• Research Labs
• Research Centers
• Cores and Resources
• Programs & Admissions
• Our Community
• Departments, Centers & Offices
• About the Medical School

Global Footer Secondary Navigation