This Week with EdSurge

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Encore Episode: How Far Parents Will Go to Save on College Dec 31, 2019

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Parents are giving up custody of their kids to get need-based college financial aid. That was a headline in August in ProPublica Illinois, and it got people talking once again about the madness around college admissions. In comments on the ProPublica article and in other online forums, though, plenty of people chimed in expressing sympathy for these Chicago-area parents, calling their move a clever solution to an overwhelming challenge facing their children. To these commenters, the real problem is the high cost of college and what they see as unfair rules around how much parents are expected to contribute.

Teaching Students How to Live a Good Life Dec 24, 2019

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When people think of education, they often picture content knowledge in subjects like reading, writing or arithmetic. But there’s a growing interest in bigger questions—like whether schools, colleges or job-training programs teach the social and emotional skills people need to make it in today’s complex world. For our final podcast of the year, we get philosophical, looking at ideas of what a good life looks like.

Why Music Education Is More Than Learning How to Play Dec 17, 2019

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If you were fortunate enough to have music education in school, what were those classes like? Musicians and music educators alike say that learning music is so much more than just playing an instrument, or learning about your favorite artists. It’s a window into other disciplines and life skills, and teaches you how to learn and get along.

A Podcast for Every Discipline? The Rise of Educational Audio Dec 10, 2019

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It's well-known that podcasting is huge these days. But you might not realize how many educational podcasts are out there. By educational, we mean shows that promise to teach listeners some super-focused topic, like a specific period of history or an academic discipline. Today we’re digging into this growing subculture of educational podcasting, and look at how educators are using these podcasts in formal classes, in ways that make a unique contribution to their teaching.

When College Becomes a Benefit of Employment Dec 03, 2019

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These days working at a fast-food restaurant or other service-industry job often comes with a new benefit—a college education. Well, more employers, including big-names like Starbucks and McDonalds, are offering tuition-assistance to workers, or even letting them take courses for free. This is part two of our two-part series asking how well these education-as-a-benefit programs work? And who do they work for?

How Algorithms are Changing Low-Wage Work Nov 26, 2019

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A growing number of fast-food restaurants have added free or heavily-subsidized college education options for their workers. But how well do these new benefits work in practice? And what kinds of people do they best serve? In the first of a two-part series, we look at how tech is changing low-wage work—and what one author sees as obstacles to these new education-as-a-benefit programs.

Many Frustrated Teachers Say It’s Not Burnout—It’s Demoralization Nov 19, 2019

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A few years ago, after more two decades in the classroom, Chrissy Romano-Arribito began to experience something that may sound familiar to a lot of teachers: burnout. Or not burnout, exactly, but demoralization. Experts like Bowdoin College education chair Doris Santoro, author of the book “Demoralized,” note that as systemic pressure, such as top-down initiatives or punitive evaluation systems, crowd out teacher autonomy, they feel they can no longer tap into what “makes their work morally good.”

The Latest Innovation in Student Retention at Colleges: 'Food Scholarships' Nov 12, 2019

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College kids have a reputation for seeking out free food, and that's why any student organizer knows that ordering pizza is a good way to lure folks to a meeting. But for many students, hunger is a more serious problem. Many campus leaders are trying new ways to address the problem of 'food insecurity' on campus—which can impact professors as well as students.

What Happened to the '$100 Laptop' Project? Nov 05, 2019

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Back in 2005, one of the biggest stories in tech was a push by a group of MIT professors to build a $100 laptop and give them to children in schools around the world. It was presented as a feel-good story that no one could object to. The story of how these laptops grew into a cultural phenomenon, what their educational impact was, and of what happened to them after they faded from public discussion, is the subject of a new book by Morgan Ames, an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley.

Speed Demons: How Quantum Computing Could Change Education Oct 29, 2019

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Computing experts love speed races, and there’s an ongoing battle to build the fastest computer on earth. Usually the overall trend follows what’s known as Moore’s Law, with the speed of the fastest computer doubling every 14 months or so. But last week saw the announcement of a new kind of speed record. A team of scientists from Google said they used a quantum computer to solve a problem in less than four minutes that would have taken a traditional supercomputer 10,000 years to complete. What could quantum computing mean for education?

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