This hearing serves as a first in a set of hearings focusing on early learning. In his opening statement, Senator Tom Harkin, Chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, strongly encouraged members of this committee on both sides of the aisle to hold roundtables and have discussions on early learning in their local…

In the winter of 2009, with more than 1.4 million job losses in the first two months of the year, the federal government passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law as a way to quickly inject liquidity into a stalling economy and maintain critical services that would allow individuals and communities to survive through the…

A Washington research group is raising questions about the wisdom of the U.S. Department of Education's favored strategies for turning around the lowest-performing schools with stimulus funding, saying that its research shows that similar federal approaches to school restructuring have not been effective. The questions raised by the new study were…

The investigation of New York State's attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, into the questionable practices of lenders in federal student-loan programs has helped raise public awareness of one of the greatest scams in our government: The Federal Family Education Loan program, otherwise known as the guaranteed-student-loan program, is unnecessarily…

This article discusses how federal and state governments can improve student access to private and public higher education institutions. Florida helps to achieve that with a common course-numbering system across community and four-year colleges, which permits students to easily transfer credits. Both the Senate and the House of Delegates in…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLBA) focused attention on the academic achievement of more than 5 million students with limited English proficiency. Obtaining valid test results for these students is challenging, given their language barriers. This testimony describes: (1) the extent to which these students are meeting annual academic…