Liz Willen

Time to take a stand against confusing acronyms and overused jargon in education.

Ted Dintersmith, executive producer of “Most Likely to Succeed.” Ted Dintersmith spent most of his career as a venture capitalist, but became both fascinated and outraged by education when he watched what was happening to his own children in school. “I felt it was almost as if school was designed to crush the creativity out […]

Hamilton College President Joan Stewart was the first in her family to go to college, and feels strongly about expanding opportunity for low-income students.” When Sweet Briar College in Virginia announced it would close this year and cited “insurmountable’’ financial challenges, a collective shudder went through the world of higher education — especially among small, […]

NEW YORK — A friend snapped photos of the colorful college brochures cramming his high school son’s mailbox and posted the pile on Facebook with a message that all but gushed, “Look which schools want us!” Colleges send out realms of encouraging mail to potential applicants every year in stepped-up-recruiting campaigns. Photo: Rob Urban As […]

Great teachers are great because they want to get better

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – Michael Walker stood in front of the nine-member Minneapolis school board on a recent snowy night and told them change must come to this Midwestern city, a place where black students are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white peers, and where educators are struggling to […]

New York – It’s the thick of college application season, and your child is diligently churning out common application essays while simultaneously studying for four or five advanced placement exams and researching scholarships, right? Well, maybe not. Click to find out how much college might cost you In households across the U.S. right now, (including […]

In her new book Building a Better Teacher, Chalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green obsessively explores what good teaching looks and sounds like – and whether the most effective teachers are “born for the blackboard,” in her words. Green’s quest takes her to schools of education and to classrooms in the United States and Japan, where she […]

Philadelphia, Miss. _ Emily Dannenberg stepped off an air-conditioned tour bus into oppressive Mississippi heat. The white Columbia University graduate student had come to this steamy rural town last week with a mission: to mentor both black and white teenagers and help them make sense of their state’s violent and racist past. “I’d always been […]

Mississippi’s former Democratic Secretary of State Dick Molpus, born and raised in Neshoba County, stood up 25 years ago at the Mount Zion Church in his hometown of Philadelphia and officially apologized to the families of the three slain civil rights workers murdered when they came to help blacks register to vote. In 1989, some […]