Education – PBS NewsHour

The National Dance Institute of New Mexico aims to instill in young people the lessons of success through lessons in dance: hard work, perseverance and health. This year, NDI taught nearly 8,000 students — a majority from low-income families — across the state, and academic performance has improved across the board. Special correspondent Kathleen McCleery reports.

To mark the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, we asked our network of Student Reporting Labs across the nation if integration should be a national goal. Here's a sampling of what they had to say.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the question of how far we’ve come in eliminating segregated education is not a simple one. Gwen Ifill leads a discussion with Cheryl Brown Henderson of the Brown Foundation for Educational Equity, Excellence and Research, Sheryll Cashin of Georgetown University, Catherine Lhamon of the Department of Education and Ron Brownstein of Atlantic Media.

Job placement and income have traditionally been key yardsticks for assessing the value of a college education. But a Gallup-Purdue survey of more than 30,000 graduates in all 50 states focuses on whether graduates have had a good life in terms of well-being, satisfaction and career engagement. Judy Woodruff talks to Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University, a partner in the study.

Starting in the 1970s, and under the recent implementation of the Common Core, a former pillar of elementary education has been largely forgotten. But there’s a feeling that learning cursive still has value, even in the age of typing and texting. The NewsHour's April Brown reports from North Carolina, one of a handful of states that's moved to make learning the formal, curlicue letters mandatory.

The Obama administration ramped up pressure to confront sexual assault within American colleges amid mounting nationwide effort to hold colleges and universities accountable. Amherst College president Carolyn "Biddy" Martin, Andrea Pino of End Rape on Campus and Alison Kiss of the Clery Center for Security on Campus join Judy Woodruff to evaluate the recent progress, and what more needs to be done.

The graduation rates for American high schools have reached 80 percent, according to a report based on statistics from the Department of Education. Jeffrey Brown discusses the milestone and the work that lies ahead with John Bridgeland of Civic Enterprises, an author of the report.

Charter school enrollment has soared from about 300,000 a little more than a decade ago to nearly 2 million students nationwide. But the expansion of charter schools, whose public funding is supplemented with private donations, has created serious competition for limited resources and space. Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters reports on the ongoing battle in New York.

It’s the time of year when students around the country are receiving college acceptance letters. Now comes the number crunching: how will they pay? Hari Sreenivasan talks to Claudio Sanchez of NPR and Roberta Johnson of Iowa State University about calculating the costs and navigating the financial aid options.

Around the country, 30 governors are proposing the expansion of preschool programs in their states. But what makes a pre-K program sufficiently educational? And how will the U.S. pay for these programs? Special correspondent John Tulenko of Learning Matters examines the debate over the value and the cost.

Arguments ended this week in a landmark California lawsuit in which nine public school students sued to overturn the state's teacher tenure laws. Will the outcome spell the end of some prized teacher rights? Experts say the case could impact education reform efforts nationwide.

Indiana, one of the 45 states that adopted the national Common Core educational standards, has became the first state to drop them. Across the country, anger over the federal government’s role in schools has been focused at Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Special correspondent for education John Merrow reports on Duncan’s role in the evolution of American educational policy.

The Department of Education published a report that shows sweeping patterns of disparity by race in public schools across the country, including fewer advanced classes available to students of color and a disproportionately high percentage of suspensions. Hari Sreenivasan gets reaction from Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary in the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

The percentage of students who receive music education has been in decline for decades. The Harmony Project, a music program for inner-city kids in Los Angeles partners with a neurobiologist to study the impact of music training on the learning skills of poor children.

The College Board announced a partial overhaul of the SAT, slated to take effect in the spring of 2016, which will eliminate the mandatory essay, revert to a top score of 1600 and create new fee waivers for lower-income students, among other changes. Judy Woodruff turns to special correspondent for education John Merrow to examine the measures and what they mean for students.