Anya Kamenetz

As President Obama unveils new efforts to help college graduates with student loan debt, there's new focus on the problems that drive that debt: the cost of college and the reasons it's been skyrocketing.

A few months ago, when I told friends and media colleagues that I was interested in the Common Core State Standards, the most common response was "What's that?"

Now, it seems, everyone has an opinion about the Core.

And right now, opinions about the K-12 learning goals for math and ...

Millions of young college graduates are now heading to job fairs. They'll be sweating in their unfamiliar suits in the summer heat. They'll be wondering: Do I really have what it takes to cut it in this job market? New research indicates that employers are just as doubtful.

The latest ...

"The talk." The facts of life. The birds and the bees. Whatever you call it, do you remember when and how you first learned about human sexuality? For me, it was a series of conversations in school and with my parents that began in third grade with the classic picture ...

Conde Nast, the magazine publishing company known for The New Yorker, Wired and Vogue, is getting into the US higher education market.

As our public media colleagues at Marketplace reported, the company is partnering with a venture capital firm and some as-yet-unnamed universities to launch a set of co-branded ...

As we're detailing this week, teachers and school leaders have a lot of work to do to adopt curricula aligned with the new Common Core State Standards.

In the Internet era, the best resources should be able to easily leap political boundaries and get into the hands of ...

"A Rational Conversation" is a column by writer Eric Ducker in which he gets on iChat or Gchat or the phone with a special guest to examine a music-related subject that's entered the pop culture consciousness.

Searching for new ways to get and hold listeners' attention, more and ...

New Orleans marked a milestone last week. The city's "Recovery School District" closed its remaining five public schools, making it the first public all-charter school district in the nation.

Weekend Edition Sunday's Rachel Martin spoke with Sarah Carr, an education reporter for the nonprofit Hechinger Report and author ...

At our neighborhood playground in Brooklyn, you can hear kids shouting and playing in Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Tagalog, French, Hebrew, Vietnamese, Cantonese and Polish. This kind of giddy cacophony has been par for the course in New York City for 150 years, but it's becoming more and more common across ...

The white, split-rail fences of horse farms line the two-lane road that takes you southwest from Lexington. It's a beautiful half-hour drive to Danville, Ky.

Settled in 1783, the town is proud of its history. In Constitution Square, across Main Street from Burke's Bakery, sits a tiny log cabin that ...

The American Civil Liberties Union today filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that high poverty schools in California are denying students the learning time they need to succeed. The problem is so great and so pervasive, the lawsuit claims, that it violates the state constitution. "We just celebrated the anniversary ...

A new pioneer has just planted its flag on the ed-tech frontier: the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Its government this week announced the creation of a "national knowledge network" to promote free online learning in partnership with Khan Academy and Coursera. The initiative ...

The New York Times highlighted new data yesterday that once again beats the drum: Despite skyrocketing costs, a college degree is a good investment. In fact, MIT economist David Autor writes in the journal Science that the value of a degree is rising. College grads made almost twice as ...

States are centralizing record-keeping and tracking student progress, while online educational software sheds light on how students learn. But many worry about how this information could be misused.

For our first blog post last week, we asked about the biggest opportunities and challenges in education today and repeated the call on Twitter. Here's what you said. You can also read this story on Storify.

"Would you be mine? Could you be mine? Won't you be my neighbor?"

Fred Rogers — the beloved TV host, Presbyterian minister, puppeteer, composer, organist, best-selling author and cardigan aficionado — died in 2003, but his ideas on education are as relevant as ever.

Here's why Mr. Rogers still matters:

...

A trillion dollars in debt. Financial outlook downgraded. Skyrocketing prices, yet falling or stagnant revenue for 40 percent of the sector. Government threatening to increase regulation.

By the standards of Wall Street, higher ed is in deep trouble.

But, of course, the university isn't ...

Teenagers face some serious issues: drugs, bullying, sexual violence, depression, gangs. They don't always like to talk about these things with adults.

One way that researchers and educators can get around that is to give teens a survey — a simple, anonymous questionnaire they can fill out by themselves without ...

There are more than 7,000 colleges in the U.S., and 21.8 million students enrolled in them. That's potentially 21.8 million opinions about what makes a school "the best."

The penalty for a bad choice can be huge. The cost of a degree continues to soar, graduation rates vary widely from ...

Our new searchable database of commencement speeches brings you more than 300 of the best, tagged with the most enduring themes: Work hard. Change the world. And, of course, YOLO.