Kaplan University  charges the following populations different amounts for a 180 quarter unit Bachelor of Science degree: $30,000 for active duty military, $41,000 for veterans, $50,000 for international students and $68,000 for low income Title IV eligible students.   Why do the poor pay more? Kaplan blames it on a government regulation called the 90/10 [...]

Every day, millions of American children are forced to start their school day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. They are told by their principals that it is required, but it is not. The Pledge is considered to be an oath of allegiance and it is a “government-sanctioned endorsement of religion,” that “violates the Establishment [...]

Elizabeth Bucher, 19, who is attending a California community college in Sonoma County (Santa Rosa Junior College), did all she could to get into Biology 2.1 this semester, the last class she needed to transfer to UC Davis.  The problem is that the classes were full and the seats were not available.  The students were [...]

In the last year, the national education debate has been occupied by economists, billionaires, hedge-fund managers, corporate columnists and party-politicians –indeed, it seems like the further a person is from the classroom, the more weight his opinion carries. Call it the Gates Paradox – the power of your voice in the “education reform” debate is [...]

The National Education Association (NEA) received criticism for publishing an Op-Ed with Teach for America (TFA). Ken Bernstein found the piece to be “unbelievable,” while raising the possibility that union members felt betrayed. Anthony Cody first responded with “I just don’t get it,” and then raised this question: “I wonder how it is possible to [...]

Dear Rethinking Schools friends, Did you see the news last week? On Friday, we learned that our book Rethinking Columbus was banned — along with other books used in Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, including Paulo Freire’s A Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, and Elizabeth Martinez’s 500 Years of Chicano History in [...]

Did you know that 76 Percent of For-Profit College Students Attend Schools that are Wall Street Owned?  Did you know that 86 Percent of Revenues Come from Federal Taxpayer Dollars?  Did you know that For-Profit Colleges Spend the Majority of Revenues on Marketing and Profit while Few Services Are Provided Except Recruiters?  And tuition is [...]

When educational research reaches the public through the corporate media, the consequences are often dire. Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff released “The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood” and immediately The New York Times pronounced in “Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gains”: “Elementary- and middle-school teachers who help raise [...]

It is not my custom to spend time on an article from American Thinker, a conservative publication whose political editor brags about appearances on the Dennis Miller show, but Unsolved Mystery: D.C. Public Schools Cheating Scandal by M. Catharine Evans and Ann Kane is informative and important. I’m interested not so much in the D. [...]

Let me preface this commentary with a confession: I have lived my entire life in South Carolina, a non-union state, and I have always felt a tug toward a Henry David Thoreau-Groucho Marx-Woody Allen-esque recalcitrance to join anything. That said, I have come to see a powerful and often unspoken distinction between organizations, about which [...]