education

Last week, the National Council of Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA), hosted Fast Forward 2060: Highlighting Legacy and Action in the Asian American and Pacific Islander Community Under President Obama and Beyond. We wanted to highlight some of the policy discussions at Fast Forward 2060, a conference hosted by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and […]

BY DAVID PAYNE In 1st grade, I was labeled as gifted in math. One problem, I was not gifted. I can understand the error; I solved advanced problems with ease. Over the years, my teachers kept me occupied with a variety of approaches while my classmates were in math class. In 2nd grade, I was […]

Education policy in Singapore has attracted much attention of late. In the recent parliamentary speeches, Ms Denise Phua (MP, Jalan Besar GRC) commented on how the Direct Admission System disproportionally benefits wealthy families. Mr Png Eng Huat (MP, Hougang) also expressed worries about the billion-dollar tuition culture. A good primary education is perceived to be […]

  BY CHANTE LANTOS-SWETT On Monday, March 7, at 11:30 a.m., more than 3,000 students from schools all across the Boston Public School District stood up from their desks and joined their peers in front of the State House to protest a proposed $50 million cut to the 2016-2017 school year budget. Armed with protest […]

Earlier this year, President Obama’s final State of the Union address discussed early childhood education, high school graduation rates, and community college access. But President Obama skirted a larger issue: poor academic preparation at the K-12 level is a root cause of a lack of people of color in higher education and in the fields […]

Introduction Both French and post-independence Algerian rulers imposed a simplistic, narrow definition of identity on Algeria. These choices were dictated by ideologies associated with colonization and Pan-Arabism, marginalizing other key components of Algerian identity. In doing so, both the colonizer and the dictator were able to effectively maintain power in pitting cultural, linguistic, and ethnic […]

BY HAYLING PRICE AND JACOB COHEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  Introduction The zip code a child resides in should not determine his or her life prospects. Yet, many neighborhoods of concentrated poverty struggle to provide children with pathways to opportunity. To address this intractable moral and […]

BY LUCY BOYD The second Republican debate in September covered everything from the Iranian nuclear deal to vaccinations. Climate Change. Immigration. Putin. China. All were given significant airtime during the lengthy three-hour time slot. One important topic left completely unaddressed: our failing public education system. But that may not be a bad thing. The Common […]

BY TYLER S. THIGPEN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  The conversation that most haunted Marshall Chambers—former director of strategic initiatives for Barrow County Schools, a rural district in Georgia—happened in 2001 at one of the district’s high schools. Chambers, himself a graduate of Piedmont College in Demorest, […]

BY RUFINA PARK This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  On the surface, South Korea’s education system has notable merits. In the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) 2012 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, which measures the cognitive skills of fifteen-year-olds from sixty-five participating economies […]

BY LUCY BOYD “[Charter schools] have become the leading edge of long-cherished ideological crusade by the far right to turn education into a consumer choice rather than a civic obligation.”  – Diane Ravitch, a leading author and academic on the American education system. “The only threat charter schools hold is to the myth that poor […]

Today, more Latinos are attending college than ever before. During the 2012 academic year, there were 2.4 million Latinos enrolled in college, comprising 19% of the total college-going population. Despite this surge in college enrollment, only 9% of the total Latino population between the ages of 25 and 29 holds a bachelor’s degree. This paints a bleak picture for Latinos as they strive for the American Dream, as enrolling in college without attaining a degree will not necessarily facilitate upward socioeconomic mobility. Further, Latino college students are also grappling with this generation’s greatest financial burden—student loan debt.