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EWA President Stephanie Banchero sits down with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for a wide-ranging discussion on innovation and education. Recorded May 2, 2013, at EWA's 66th National Seminar at Stanford University.

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Student loan debt is still near a $1 trillion, there are more schools with concentrated poverty, and college degrees are leading to more jobs following a dip during the economic downturn. These are some of the findings from the federal government’s “The Condition of Education 2013,” an annual report issued this week by the U.S. Department of Education.

“Today’s economy puts young graduates in a difficult position” said Jack Buckley, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, the research arm of the department of education. “A college diploma no longer guarantees a direct pathway to the middle class, making it harder to justify the expense of a degree.“

Buckley added: “Yet, when we look at the low employment rates for those who have only completed high school or less, we see how hard it is to get a good job without some type of higher education.”

Read on to see detailed figures on K-12 spending, gender differences in graduation rates, poverty among kindergartners, and more.

Reporters and families are often on the hunt for good data—about schools in the neighborhood, TV’s effects on learning, average debt level after completing college—that are also easy to decipher. But even though we’re in the era of big data, much of the information that’s public is often tucked behind wonky smoke and mirrors, leaving would-be gumshoes lost on the trail.

The White House, however, is trying to make the information government agencies churn out more accessible. Earlier this month, President Obama signed an executive order that calls on all federal departments to release public data in formats that developers and entrepreneurs can easily adopt for consumer services. In the text of the order and an accompanying document, the president stressed the information should be “open and machine readable” for the purposes of fueling “entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific discovery that improves Americans’ lives.”

Read on to see what NCES Commissioner Jack Buckley has to say about education data systems. Something to keep in mind: What education data tools do you hope will come of the executive order?

Average student debt for the class of 2013 with bachelor degrees has reached new heights at $30,000. The news comes as a double-edged sword for this latest cohort of newly educated workers: employment prospects have improved since they entered college in 2009 yet they have more debt to pay off.

The high-water mark was calculated by education finance expert Mark Kantrowitz, who used government data to come up with the new number.

Kantrowitz’s findings (earlier reported on by The Wall Street Journal) are higher than those calculated by the College Board, which recently reported that average debt among students who borrowed money and graduated in 2010-11 was $25,300. But while borrowers with a degree have higher wages and are less likely to be unemployed than those who don’t, dropouts are less fortunate, as this report from the Department of Education on debt levels for college non-completers shows.

Read the rest here

At EWA’s National Seminar at Stanford University on May 2, a panel that included an investigative reporter, an academic and an advocate looked at the issue of the “school-to-prison pipeline” and how to stop it. As panelist and UCLA professor Phillip Atiba Goff put it, “If you want to get people arrested, send a cop to where they are.”

But the issue might be even greater than the criminalization of discipline and misbehavior. What if the “pipeline” also squelches a student’s natural curiosity and desire to experiment, even when the experiment turns out badly?

A Florida student, Kiera Wilmot, 16, was arrested and threatened with felony charges and expulsion for mixing toilet-bowl cleaner and aluminum foil in an 8-ounce plastic bottle. The news created a furor among scientists and the science-education community, as the Orlando Sentinel describes.

Read the rest...

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