The completion agenda seeks significant increases in educational attainment, and its goals are quite laudable. The United States is lagging behind other industrialized nations in terms of the proportion of adults holding postsecondary degrees, and states have been challenged to implement policies that ensure improvements in degree completion…

The completion agenda (also referred to as the "reform" movement) is focused mainly on state policy leaders, governors, legislators, and boards of higher education. Complete College America (CCA), a national nonprofit organization established in 2009 to increase educational attainment in the United States, is the standard bearer of the completion…

One of the dilemmas that policy makers, campus leaders, and individual faculty members often describe with chagrin is the difficulty of scaling up successful innovations. Officials at the National Science Foundation (NSF), for example, admit they are discouraged because the results of most NSF-funded projects are not disseminated beyond the target…

The United States Air Force Academy, United States Naval Academy, and United States Military Academy are America's three largest service academies. They are "the" primary undergraduate institutions and commissioning sources that educate and develop the officers who are expected to lead this nation's armed forces. They are special places that have…

Several years ago, when the author was associate dean in the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, a new senior administrator on campus expressed the view that one of their premier first-year experience programs in the college was too expensive and that a different model, based on an approach taken at the administrator's previous…

Within higher education in the United States and Canada, calls to promote global awareness and global literacy among undergraduate students have become increasingly urgent. Yet, there are multiple challenges in achieving these outcomes. One challenge lies in making this "literacy" authentic and relevant for diverse students aspiring to be…

Through its signature initiative, Liberal Education and America's Promise (LEAP), the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) is promoting a vision for learning that begins in school: Starting in School . . . Rigorous and rich curriculum focused on the essential learning outcomes; comprehensive, individualized, and…

In this article, the author offers reflections on the impact of mobile technology for liberal education. These reflections are based on his own experience of incorporating iPads in his communication courses during the 2010-2011 academic year. As a member of an interdisciplinary faculty learning community on the use of mobile tablets, he explored…

Generally, boys and girls become more polarized through their first years in school. Now, researchers have started to explore how to span that sex divide and are finding that more-equitable coed classrooms can have social and academic benefits for boys and girls alike. While children of both sexes play together as toddlers, by the end of…

Once considered a way to help integrate racially divided districts, magnet schools today have been forced to evolve, given increasing pressure to provide more public school choices and legal barriers against using race to determine school enrollment. In a post-desegregation era, many large districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore County…

School districts have resorted to hiring debt collectors, employing constables, and swapping out standard meals for scaled-back versions to try to coerce parents to pay off school lunch debt that, in recent years, appears to have surged as the result of a faltering economy and better record-keeping. While the average school lunch costs just about…

During the first-ever Digital Learning Day, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chief Julius Genachowski unveiled an ambitious plan earlier this year to get schools to switch from print to digital textbooks by 2017. Dubbed the Digital Textbook Playbook, it's a recommendation for how schools could transform…

Dozens of teachers and literacy specialists from across the country hunkered down in Baltimore at round tables, with laptops, pens, and paper, intent on rewriting the collections that wield tremendous influence over the way millions of U.S. children learn literacy skills: the big-name basal readers. Hailing from 18 school districts in 11 states,…

For a generation of children immersed in technology, emerging research suggests that while the temptation to multitask may be pervasive, the ability to control it could be the real bellwether of academic success. The pervasiveness of technology and social media, coupled with a fear of missing out on something important, has led students to pay…

Just days before a massive tornado devastated their community last May, a group of Joplin, Mo., educators and other community members had a meeting about "21st-century learning." Then May 22 arrived, bringing the catastrophic storm that ripped through the community of 50,000 in the southwest corner of the state. The tornado killed 161 people and…