As a recent study indicates that college and universities are giving financial aid to rich students at the expense of poor ones Senator Elizabeth Warren is offering a bill to bring student debt relief. Warren says students should get the same rates as Wall Street. Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced her first standalone piece of legislation [...]

A report by the New America Foundation details the systematic undermining of the financial aid system by colleges and universities who are using financial aid to attract wealthy students rather than open doors for poorer ones, forcing poorer students to either not attend or take on high debt burdens. Undermining Pell presents a new analysis [...]

In a stunning lack of sensitivity and self-awareness New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie referred to an African-American constituent as “boy” during a heated argument over the governor’s plan to privatize schools in New Jersey. The man shouted “Fix the public schools.” Christie responded “Yeah I hear ya boy, I hear ya.” The original video [...]

A Superior Court judge has ordered the City of Newark to release emails that were exchanged about the $100 million pledge that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg made to Newark schools in September 2010.

In a bizarre press conference, NRA Chairman Wayne LaPierre called for the immediate placement of armed guards in all public schools. This is classic “fighting the last war” thinking, along with a dash of “think of the children” policymaking. Just quickly, because you shouldn’t even dignify this with much of a response. One, it would [...]

The New York Fed released their household credit and debt report yesterday, and they show increases in student loan debt relative to other forms (mortgage, credit card, auto loan and others). To keep this in perspective, mortgage debt represents 71% of all debt, and student debt represents about 8-9%. So there’s still a wide gulf [...]

Matt Yglesias uses his perch at Slate for the important work of criticizing a tweet I made a few days ago about a University of Phoenix ad I saw. Yglesias makes a distinction between saying on a macro level that there exists a mismatch in skills for employees in America, and saying on a micro [...]

Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the former chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and now a professor at UC-Berkeley, had a pretty bold opinion piece in the New York Times the other day, relating income inequality and educational opportunity in ways that I found compelling. The United States is caught in a vicious cycle largely [...]

Here’s an interesting and less-discussed portion of the now-infamous Mitt Romney fundraising tape, where he explains the importance of being American: Romney told the donors there are people who say to him, “‘Oh, you were born with a silver spoon,’ you know, ‘You never had to earn anything,’ and so forth. And, and frankly, I [...]

Dylan Matthews intends to wrap up the Chicago teachers strike with an assessment of what both sides got out of the contract “in one post.” Here’s a list, in one post, of some of the things he left out, culled mostly from what the CTU informed its members was in the contract. • Arts, music [...]

I wish I had known about this before the Chicago Teachers Union suspended their strike and returned to work, but it may shed some light on the timing of the suspension. At the least, it provides a little more context for what teachers unions have to deal with on the ground. Apparently the above anti-union [...]