For more than two weeks, students have occupied the main campus of the University of Chile in Santiago, spreading sleeping bags across office floors between empty soda cans brimming with cigarette butts. On one chilly afternoon "There is a demand for structural change in Chilean society that hasn't occurred in 20 years," says pollster and political analyst Marta Lagos. But on no issue does that demand seem more intense than education - which could be key ...

These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education.  When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties — and inducements — of university tenure can be, and why ...

My earliest and most vivid recollection is of being held by my ears over a well in the compound of a house where my family was then living, at what is now Tembeling Road in Singapore. I was about four years old. I had been mischievous and had messed up an expensive jar of my father's 4711 pale-green scented brilliantine. My father had a violent temper, but that evening his rage went through the roof. He took me ...

Clarification Appended: Nov. 10, 2009Lunch period at an inner-city all-boys school is an event associated with the sounds of chaos, not classical music. And yet there are definitely strains of Beethoven coming from the piano in the cafeteria at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. Behind the pianist, another student waits patiently for his turn. Upstairs in the art room, a senior is using the lunch hour to apply more brushstrokes to a portrait. A few kids ...

A newly released report on student achievement finds that members of the nation's second largest ethnic group are still woefully underperforming their white counterparts. The report, issued June 23 by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics shows that while scores have gone up for both groups, Hispanic students lag by the same amount today as they did in 1990, which means that the achievement gap between Hispanic and white students has been ...

In a barebones basement office in Buffalo, New York, Katie Campos, an education activist, is plotting a revolution. She and her miniscule staff of the education reform advocacy group, Buffalo ReformED, are against incredible odds. In less than a week they are trying to get a controversial law through the New York State Legislature that is known as the Parent Trigger. It's a powerful nickname for game-changing legislation that would enable parents at any persistently failing school ...

"Ba-Boom!" Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia's Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor's face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off ...

With Singapore's birth rate plummeting faster than its employment numbers, the city-state's government is trying to find new ways to get its citizens in the sack. But despite a state-sponsored speed-dating program, surveys show that Singaporeans still have less sex than almost anyone else in the world. The birth rate is languishing at 1.4 children per woman, well below the 2.1 required for a population to replace itself. That's where the Love Boat comes in. The brainchild of self-styled sex guru Dr. Wei Siang Yu, ...

Barely a month ago, big , bluff William Bennett looked upon his early works as Secretary of Education and declared them good. "I have more affinity with the views of the American people than do most of my academic colleagues," he announced. "I think I am in the mainstream of American thinking." If so, then it is a turbulent mainstream, and at times Bennett has seemed in need of a pilot. Since taking office Feb. 6, he has been a ...