education system

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

Prehistoric and primitive cultures

• Mesopotamia
• North China
• The Hindu tradition
• The introduction of Buddhist influences
• Classical India
• Indian influences on Asia
• Xi (Western) Zhou (1046–771 bce )
• Dong (Eastern) Zhou (770–256 bce )
• Qin autocracy (221–206 bce )
• Scholarship under the Han (206 bce –220 ce )
• Introduction of Buddhism
• Ancient Hebrews
• Education of youth
• Higher education
• The institutions
• Physical education
• The primary school
• Secondary education
• Early Roman education
• Roman modifications
• Education in the later Roman Empire
• Ancient Persia
• Elementary education
• Professional education
• Early Russian education: Kiev and Muscovy
• Influences on Muslim education and culture
• Aims and purposes of Muslim education
• Organization of education
• Major periods of Muslim education and learning
• Influence of Islamic learning on the West
• From the beginnings to the 4th century
• From the 5th to the 8th century
• The Irish and English revivals
• The cultural revival under Charlemagne and his successors
• Influences of the Carolingian renaissance abroad
• Education of the laity in the 9th and 10th centuries
• Monastic schools
• Urban schools
• New curricula and philosophies
• Thomist philosophy
• The Italian universities
• The French universities
• The English universities
• Universities elsewhere in Europe
• General characteristics of medieval universities
• Lay education and the lower schools
• The foundations of Muslim education
• The Mughal period
• The Tang dynasty (618–907 ce )
• The Song (960–1279)
• The Mongol period (1206–1368)
• The Ming period (1368–1644)
• The Manchu period (1644–1911/12)
• The ancient period to the 12th century
• Education of the warriors
• Education in the Tokugawa era
• Effect of early Western contacts
• The Muslim influence
• The secular influence
• Early influences
• Emergence of the new gymnasium
• Nonscholastic traditions
• Dutch humanism
• Juan Luis Vives
• The early English humanists
• Luther and the German Reformation
• The English Reformation
• The French Reformation
• The Calvinist Reformation
• The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation
• The legacy of the Reformation
• The new scientism and rationalism
• The Protestant demand for universal elementary education
• The pedagogy of Ratke
• The pedagogy of Comenius
• The schools of Gotha
• Courtly education
• The teaching congregations
• Female education
• The Puritan reformers
• Royalist education
• The academies
• John Locke’s empiricism and education as conduct
• Giambattista Vico, critic of Cartesianism
• The condition of the schools and universities
• August Hermann Francke
• Johann Julius Hecker
• The Sensationists
• The Rousseauists
• National education under enlightened rulers
• Spanish and Portuguese America
• French Québec
• New England
• The new academies
• The middle colonies
• The Southern colonies
• Newfoundland and the Maritime Provinces.
• The social and historical setting
• The pedagogy of Pestalozzi
• The influence of Pestalozzi
• The pedagogy of Froebel
• The kindergarten movement
• The psychology and pedagogy of Herbart
• The Herbartians
• Other German theorists
• French theorists
• Spencer’s scientism
• Humboldt’s reforms
• Developments after 1815
• Girls’ schools
• The new German universities
• Development of state education
• Elementary Education Act
• Secondary and higher education
• The educational awakening
• Education for females
• New Zealand
• Education under the East India Company
• Indian universities
• The Meiji Restoration and the assimilation of Western civilization
• Establishment of a national system of education
• The conservative reaction
• Establishment of nationalistic education systems
• Promotion of industrial education
• Social and historical background
• Influence of psychology and other fields on education
• Traditional movements
• Progressive education
• Child-centred education
• Scientific-realist education
• Social-reconstructionist education
• Major trends and problems
• Early 19th to early 20th century
• Education Act of 1944
• The comprehensive movement
• Further education
• Imperial Germany
• Weimar Republic
• Nazi Germany
• Changes after World War II
• The Third Republic
• The Netherlands
• Switzerland
• Expansion of American education
• Curriculum reforms
• Federal involvement in local education
• Changes in higher education
• Professional organizations
• Canadian educational reforms
• The administration of public education
• Before 1917
• The Stalinist years, 1931–53
• The Khrushchev reforms
• From Brezhnev to Gorbachev
• Perestroika and education
• The modernization movement
• Education in the republic
• Education under the Nationalist government
• Education under communism
• Post-Mao education
• Communism and the intellectuals
• Education at the beginning of the century
• Education to 1940
• Education changes during World War II
• Education after World War II
• Pre-independence period
• The postindependence period in India
• The postindependence period in Pakistan
• The postindependence period in Bangladesh
• The postindependence period in Sri Lanka
• South Africa
• General influences and policies of the colonial powers
• Education in Portuguese colonies and former colonies
• German educational policy in Africa
• Education in British colonies and former colonies
• Education in French colonies and former colonies
• Education in Belgian colonies and former colonies
• Problems and tasks of African education in the late 20th century
• Colonialism and its consequences
• The second half of the 20th century
• The Islamic revival
• Migration and the brain drain
• The heritage of independence
• Administration
• Primary education and literacy
• Reform trends
• Malaysia and Singapore
• Philippines
• Education and social cohesion
• Education and social conflict
• Education and personal growth
• Education and civil society
• Education and economic development
• Primary-level school enrollments
• Secondary-level school enrollments
• Tertiary-level school enrollments
• Other developments in formal education
• Literacy as a measure of success
• Access to education
• Implications for socioeconomic status
• Social consequences of education in developing countries
• The role of the state
• Social and family interaction
• Alternative forms of education

What was education like in ancient Athens?

How does social class affect education attainment, when did education become compulsory, what are alternative forms of education, do school vouchers offer students access to better education.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• World History Encyclopedia - Education in the Elizabethan Era
• Academia - Return on Education Using the Concept of Opportunity Cost
• National Geographic - Geography
• Table Of Contents

What does education mean?

Education refers to the discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments, as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization .

Beginning approximately at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century, Athens became the first city-state in ancient Greece to renounce education that was oriented toward the future duties of soldiers. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization.

Research has found that education is the strongest determinant of individuals’ occupational status and chances of success in adult life. However, the correlation between family socioeconomic status and school success or failure appears to have increased worldwide. Long-term trends suggest that as societies industrialize and modernize, social class becomes increasingly important in determining educational outcomes and occupational attainment.

While education is not compulsory in practice everywhere in the world, the right of individuals to an educational program that respects their personality, talents, abilities, and cultural heritage has been upheld in various international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959; and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights of 1966.

Alternative forms of education have developed since the late 20th century, such as distance learning , homeschooling , and many parallel or supplementary systems of education often designated as “nonformal” and “popular.” Religious institutions also instruct the young and old alike in sacred knowledge as well as in the values and skills required for participation in local, national, and transnational societies.

School vouchers have been a hotly debated topic in the United States. Some parents of voucher recipients reported high levels of satisfaction, and studies have found increased voucher student graduation rates. Some studies have found, however, that students using vouchers to attend private schools instead of public ones did not show significantly higher levels of academic achievement. Learn more at ProCon.org.

Should corporal punishment be used in elementary education settings?

Whether corporal punishment should be used in elementary education settings is widely debated. Some say it is the appropriate discipline for certain children when used in moderation because it sets clear boundaries and motivates children to behave in school. Others say can inflict long-lasting physical and mental harm on students while creating an unsafe and violent school environment. For more on the corporal punishment debate, visit ProCon.org .

Should dress codes be implemented and enforced in education settings?

Whether dress codes should be implemented and enforced in education settings is hotly debated. Some argue dress codes enforce decorum and a serious, professional atmosphere conducive to success, as well as promote safety. Others argue dress codes reinforce racist standards of beauty and dress and are are seldom uniformly mandated, often discriminating against women and marginalized groups. For more on the dress code debate, visit ProCon.org .

Recent News

education , discipline that is concerned with methods of teaching and learning in schools or school-like environments as opposed to various nonformal and informal means of socialization (e.g., rural development projects and education through parent-child relationships).

(Read Arne Duncan’s Britannica essay on “Education: The Great Equalizer.”)

Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture . Education is designed to guide them in learning a culture , molding their behaviour in the ways of adulthood , and directing them toward their eventual role in society. In the most primitive cultures , there is often little formal learning—little of what one would ordinarily call school or classes or teachers . Instead, the entire environment and all activities are frequently viewed as school and classes, and many or all adults act as teachers. As societies grow more complex, however, the quantity of knowledge to be passed on from one generation to the next becomes more than any one person can know, and, hence, there must evolve more selective and efficient means of cultural transmission. The outcome is formal education—the school and the specialist called the teacher.

As society becomes ever more complex and schools become ever more institutionalized, educational experience becomes less directly related to daily life, less a matter of showing and learning in the context of the workaday world, and more abstracted from practice, more a matter of distilling, telling, and learning things out of context. This concentration of learning in a formal atmosphere allows children to learn far more of their culture than they are able to do by merely observing and imitating. As society gradually attaches more and more importance to education, it also tries to formulate the overall objectives, content, organization, and strategies of education. Literature becomes laden with advice on the rearing of the younger generation. In short, there develop philosophies and theories of education.

This article discusses the history of education, tracing the evolution of the formal teaching of knowledge and skills from prehistoric and ancient times to the present, and considering the various philosophies that have inspired the resulting systems. Other aspects of education are treated in a number of articles. For a treatment of education as a discipline, including educational organization, teaching methods, and the functions and training of teachers, see teaching ; pedagogy ; and teacher education . For a description of education in various specialized fields, see historiography ; legal education ; medical education ; science, history of . For an analysis of educational philosophy , see education, philosophy of . For an examination of some of the more important aids in education and the dissemination of knowledge, see dictionary ; encyclopaedia ; library ; museum ; printing ; publishing, history of . Some restrictions on educational freedom are discussed in censorship . For an analysis of pupil attributes, see intelligence, human ; learning theory ; psychological testing .

Education in primitive and early civilized cultures

The term education can be applied to primitive cultures only in the sense of enculturation , which is the process of cultural transmission. A primitive person, whose culture is the totality of his universe, has a relatively fixed sense of cultural continuity and timelessness. The model of life is relatively static and absolute, and it is transmitted from one generation to another with little deviation. As for prehistoric education, it can only be inferred from educational practices in surviving primitive cultures.

The purpose of primitive education is thus to guide children to becoming good members of their tribe or band. There is a marked emphasis upon training for citizenship , because primitive people are highly concerned with the growth of individuals as tribal members and the thorough comprehension of their way of life during passage from prepuberty to postpuberty.

Because of the variety in the countless thousands of primitive cultures, it is difficult to describe any standard and uniform characteristics of prepuberty education. Nevertheless, certain things are practiced commonly within cultures. Children actually participate in the social processes of adult activities, and their participatory learning is based upon what the American anthropologist Margaret Mead called empathy , identification, and imitation . Primitive children, before reaching puberty, learn by doing and observing basic technical practices. Their teachers are not strangers but rather their immediate community .

In contrast to the spontaneous and rather unregulated imitations in prepuberty education, postpuberty education in some cultures is strictly standardized and regulated. The teaching personnel may consist of fully initiated men, often unknown to the initiate though they are his relatives in other clans. The initiation may begin with the initiate being abruptly separated from his familial group and sent to a secluded camp where he joins other initiates. The purpose of this separation is to deflect the initiate’s deep attachment away from his family and to establish his emotional and social anchorage in the wider web of his culture.

The initiation “curriculum” does not usually include practical subjects. Instead, it consists of a whole set of cultural values, tribal religion, myths , philosophy, history, rituals, and other knowledge. Primitive people in some cultures regard the body of knowledge constituting the initiation curriculum as most essential to their tribal membership. Within this essential curriculum, religious instruction takes the most prominent place.

The Education System of the United States of America: Overview and Foundations

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2022
• pp 1015–1042
• Cite this reference work entry

• Paul R. Fossum 3  

Part of the book series: Global Education Systems ((GES))

2189 Accesses

Prevailing discourse in the USA about the country’s teachers, educational institutions, and instructional approaches is a conversation that is national in character. Yet the structures and the administrative and governance apparatuses themselves are strikingly local in character across the USA. Public understanding and debate about education can be distorted in light of divergence between the country’s educational aspirations and the vehicles in place for pursuing those aims. In addressing its purpose as a survey of US education, the following chapter interrogates this apparent contradiction, first discussing historical and social factors that help account for a social construction of the USA as singular and national system. Discussion then moves to a descriptive analysis of education in the USA as institutionalized at the numerous levels – aspects that often reflect local prerogative and difference more so than a uniform national character. The chapter concludes with summary points regarding US federalism as embodied in the country’s oversight and conduct of formal education.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Subscribe and save.

• Get 10 units per month
• Download Article/Chapter or eBook
• 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
• Cancel anytime
• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

The Education System of the United States of America

School Education Systems and Policies in South Asia

Barber, B. R. (1993). America skips school: Why we talk so much about education and do so little. Harper’s Magazine, 287 (1722), 39–46.

Google Scholar  

Beck, R. (1990). Vocational preparation and general education . Berkeley: National Center for Research in Vocational Education.

Berliner, D. C. (2011). The context for interpreting PISA results in the USA. In M. A. Pereyra, H.-G. Kotthoff, & R. Cowen (Eds.), PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, changing schools (pp. 77–96). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. (1995). The manufactured crisis: Myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools . Reading: Addison-Wesley.

Brubacher, J. S., & Rudy, W. (1997). Higher education in transition: A history of American colleges and universities . Transaction Publishers. Piscataway, New Jersey [NJ], United States.

Carson, C. C., Huelskamp, R., & Woodall, T. (1993). Perspectives on education in America: An annotated briefing. Sandia report. Journal of Educational Research, 86 (5), 259–310.

Article   Google Scholar  

Center for Postsecondary Research. (2019). Carnegie classification of institutions of higher education . School of Education, Indiana University. http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/

Clauset, A., Arbesman, S., & Larremore, D. B. (2015). Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. Science Advances, 1 (1), 1–6.

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, National Education Association. (1918). Cardinal principles of secondary education, Bureau of Education bulletin . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Cremin, L. A. (1957). The republic and the school: Horace Mann on the education of free men . New York: Teachers College Press.

Cremin, L. A. (1961). The transformation of the American school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957 . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Cremin, L. A. (1988). American education: The metropolitan experience, 1876–1980 . New York: Harper-Collins.

Crowley, S., & Green, E. L. (2019). A college chain crumbles, and millions in student loan cash disappears. New York Times , March 7. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/business/argosy-college-art-insititutes-south-university.html

Curti, M. (1943). The growth of American thought . New York: Harper and Brothers.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2010). The flat world and education: How America’s commitment to equity will determine our future . New York: Teachers College Press.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education . New York: The Free Press.

Diffey, L. (2018). 50-state comparison: State Kindergarten-through-third-grade policies . Denver: Education Commission of the States. https://www.ecs.org/kindergarten-policies/ . Last accessed 12 Mar 2019.

Finn, C. E., Julian, L., & Petrilli, M. J. (Eds.). (2006). The state of state standards 2006 . Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

Fischer, K. (2019). It’s a New Assault on the University. Chronicle of Higher Education (February 17). https://www.chronicle.com/article/its-anew-assault-on-the-university/

Flaherty, C. (2017). Killing tenure. Inside Higher Ed (January 13). https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/01/13/legislation-two-statesseeks-eliminate-tenure-publichigher-education .

Friedman-Krauss, A. H., Steven Barnett, W., Garver, K. A., Hodges, K. S., Weisenfeld, G. G., & DiCrecchio, N. (2019). The state of preschool 2018: State preschool yearbook . New Brunswick: Rutgers University, National Institute for Early Education Research. http://nieer.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/YB2018_Full-ReportR3wAppendices.pdf . Last accessed 30 Apr 2019.

Fulton, M. (2019). 50-state comparison: State postsecondary governance structures . Denver: Education Commission of the States. https://www.ecs.org/50-state-comparison-postsecondary-governance-structures/ . Last accessed 15 Nov 2019.

Gerstle, G. (2015). Liberty and coercion: The paradox of American government from the founding to the present . Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Gutek, G. L. (2013). An historical introduction to American education (2nd ed.). Long Grove: Waveland.

Hartong, S. (2016). New structures of power and regulation within ‘distributed’ education policy: The example of the US Common Core State Standards Initiative. Journal of Education Policy, 31 (2), 213–225.

Hemelt, S. W., & Marcotte, D. E. (2016). The changing landscape of tuition and enrollment in American Public Higher Education. Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 2 (1), 42–68.

Henig, J. R. (2013). The end of exceptionalism in American education: The changing politics of school reform . Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.

Herman, J., Post, S., & O’Halloran, S. (2013). The United States is far behind other countries on pre-K . Washington, DC: Center for American Progress.

Hyslop-Margison, E. J. (1999). An assessment of the historical arguments in vocational education reform. Journal of Career and Technical Education, 17 (1), 23–30.

Hu, W. (2008). New horizons in high school classrooms. New York Times , October 26. A-21.

Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pillars of the republic: common schools and American Society, 1780–1860 . New York: Hill and Wang.

Kaestle, C. F. (1988). Public education in the old northwest: “necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind”. Indiana Magazine of History, 84 (1), 60–74.

Katz, M. B. (1968). The irony of early school reform: Educational innovation in mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Kozol, J. (1991). Savage inequalities: Children in America’s schools . New York: Crown Publishing.

Labaree, D. F. (2010). How Dewey lost: The victory of David Snedden and social efficiency in the reform of American education. In D. Trohler, T. Schlag, & F. Osterwalder (Eds.), Pragmatism and modernities (pp. 163–188). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

LaMorte, M. W. (2012). School law: Cases and concepts (10th ed.). Boston: Pearson.

Lannie, V. P. (1968). Public money and parochial education: Bishop Hughes, Governor Seward, and the New York school controversy . Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press.

Lattuca, L. R., & Stark, J. S. (2011). External influences on curriculum: Sociocultural contact. In S. R. Harper & J. F. L. Jackson (Eds.), An introduction to American higher education (pp. 93–128). New York: Routledge.

Lazerson, M., & Norton Grubb, W. (1974). Introduction. In M. Lazerson & W. N. Grubb (Eds.), American education and vocationalism: A documentary history 1870–1970 (pp. 1–56). New York: Teachers College Press.

Lynch, M. (2018). 10 (more) reasons why the U.S. education system is failing. Education Week , January 26. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2018/01/29/10-more-reasons-why-the-us-education.html . Last accessed 18 June 2020.

Malkin, M. (2013). Lessons from Texas and the revolt against Common Core power grab. Noozhawk , March 3. https://www.noozhawk.com/article/030313_michelle_malkin_texas_common_core_education_standards . Last accessed June 18, 2020.

McLaren, P. (2015). Life in schools: An introduction to critical pedagogy in the foundations of education (6th ed.). New York: Routledge.

Book   Google Scholar  

Messerli, J. (1971). Horace Mann: A biography . New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Miller, C. C. (2017). Do Preschool Teachers Really Need to Be College Graduates? (April 7). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/upshot/dopreschool-teachers-really-need-to-be-college-graduates.html .

National Center for Education Statistics. (2017a). Table 202.20, Percentage of 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children enrolled in preprimary programs, by level of program, attendance status, and selected child and family characteristics: 2017. Digest of Education Statistics. Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_202.20.asp . Last accessed 15 Jan 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2017b). Table 205.10, Private elementary and secondary school enrollment and private enrollment as a percentage of total enrollment in public and private schools, by region and grade level: Selected years, fall 1995 through fall 2015. Digest of Education Statistics. Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_205.10.asp . Last accessed 29 Jan 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2017c). Table 214.10, Number of public school districts and public and private elementary and secondary schools: Selected years, 1869–70 through 2015–16. Digest of Education Statistics. Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_214.10.asp . Last accessed 21 Jan 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2018a). NCES Blog: National spending for public schools increases for third consecutive year in school year, 2015–16. https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/national-spending-for-public-schools-increases-for-third-consecutive-year-in-school-year-2015-16 . Last accessed 7 Jan 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2018b). National postsecondary student aid study: Student financial aid estimates for 2015–16. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018466.pdf . Last accessed 7 Nov 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2018c). Number of educational institutions, by level and control of institution: Selected years, 1980–81 through 2016–17. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_105.50.asp . Last accessed 7 Nov 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019a). Characteristics of postsecondary faculty. The condition of education: letter from the commissioner. Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_csc.asp . Last accessed 20 June 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019b). The condition of education: Preschool and Kindergarten enrollment. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cfa.asp . Last accessed 21 Jan 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019c). The condition of education: Public charter school enrollment. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cgb.asp . Last accessed 20 June 2019.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019d). Digest of Education Statistics, 2017 (NCES 2018-070), Chapter 3. U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/ch_3.asp . Last accessed 20 Nov 2019.

Newman, A. (2013). Common core: A scheme to rewrite education. New American , August 8. Retrieved 20 Sept 2019, from https://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/16192-common-core-a-scheme-to-rewrite-education . Last accessed 20 Sept 2019.

Newfield, C. (2008). Unmaking the public university: The forty-year assault on the middle class . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality . New Haven: Yale University Press.

Office of Postsecondary Education. (2017). Institutional eligibility. In 2017–18 Federal student aid handbook (Vol. 2). Washington, DC: United States Department of Education. https://ifap.ed.gov/ifap/byAwardYear.jsp?type=fsahandbook&awardyear=2017-2018

Oprisko, R. (2012). Superpowers: The American academic elite. Georgetown Public Policy Review , December 3. http://gppreview.com/2012/12/03/superpowers-the-american-academic-elite/

Phi Delta Kappa. (2019). Fifty-first annual poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools . Arlington: PDK International. https://pdkpoll.org/

Povich, E. S. (2018). More community colleges are offering bachelor’s degrees – and four-year universities aren’t happy about it. Stateline , April 26. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/04/26/more-community-colleges-are-offering-bachelors-degrees

Pulliam, J. D., & Van Patten, J. J. (2013). History and social foundations of education (10th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Ravitch, D. (1977). The revisionists revised: A critique on the radical attack on the schools . New York: Basic Books.

Ravitch, D. (1983). The troubled crusade: American education, 1945–1980 . New York: Basic Books.

Reitman, S. W. (1992). The educational messiah complex: American faith in the culturally redemptive power of schooling . Sacramento: Caddo Gap Press.

Ross, D. (1991). The origins of American social science . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Schaefer, M. B., Malu, K. F., & Yoon, B. (2016). An historical overview of the middle school movement, 1963–2015. Research on Middle Level Education Online, 39 (5), 1–27.

Schneider, J. K. (2016). America’s not-so-broken education system: Do U.S. schools really need to be disrupted? The Atlantic.com , June 22. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/everything-in-american-education-is-broken/488189/

Schimmel, D., Stellman, L., Conlon, C. K., & Fischer, L. (2015). Teachers and the law (9th ed.). New York: Pearson.

Spring, J. H. (1994). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of the education of dominated cultures of the United States . New York: McGraw Hill.

Spring, J. H. (2013). The American school, a global context: From the puritans to the Obama administration (9th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill.

Stewart, K. (2012). The good news club: The Christian right’s stealth assault on America’s children . New York: Public Affairs.

United States Department of Education, Office of Innovation and Improvement. (2009). State regulation of private schools . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. https://www2.ed.gov/admins/comm/choice/regprivschl/regprivschl.pdf

United States National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk: The imperative for educational reform. A report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education . Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Urban, W. J., Wagoner, J. L., Jr., & Gaither, M. (2019). American education: A history (6th ed.). New York: Routledge.

White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. (2019). Tribal colleges and universities, U.S. Department of Education. https://sites.ed.gov/whiaiane/tribes-tcus/tribal-colleges-and-universities/

Williams, J. (1983). Reagan blames courts for education decline. Washington Post , June 30. A-2.

Yin, A. (2017). Education by the numbers: Statistics show just how profound the inequalities in America’s education system have become. New York Times Magazine , September 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/08/magazine/education-by-the-numbers.html

Download references

Acknowledgments

Funding from the University of Michigan’s Horace Rackham Graduate School and the UM’s Life Sciences Values and Society Program supported archival research and reproduction contributing to this work.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

College of Education, Health, and Human Services, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA

Paul R. Fossum

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul R. Fossum .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

DIPF - Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt/Main, Germany

Sieglinde Jornitz

Institute of Education, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Münster, Germany

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Fossum, P.R. (2021). The Education System of the United States of America: Overview and Foundations. In: Jornitz, S., Parreira do Amaral, M. (eds) The Education Systems of the Americas. Global Education Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41651-5_14

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41651-5_14

Published : 01 January 2022

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-030-41650-8

Online ISBN : 978-3-030-41651-5

eBook Packages : Education Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Education

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

• My Favorites

You have successfully logged in but...

... your login credentials do not authorize you to access this content in the selected format. Access to this content in this format requires a current subscription or a prior purchase. Please select the WEB or READ option instead (if available). Or consider purchasing the publication.

• Education at a Glance

Education at a Glance 2021

Characteristics of education systems, oecd indicators.

Education at a Glance is the authoritative source for information on the state of education around the world. It provides data on the structure, finances and performance of education systems across OECD countries and a number of partner economies. More than 100 charts and tables in this publication – as well as links to much more available on the educational database – provide key information on the output of educational institutions; the impact of learning across countries; access, participation and progression in education; the financial resources invested in education; and teachers, the learning environment and the organisation of schools.

The 2021 edition includes a focus on equity, investigating how progress through education and the associated learning and labour market outcomes are impacted by dimensions such as gender, socio-economic status, country of birth and regional location. A specific chapter is dedicated to Target 4.5 of the Sustainable Development Goal 4 on equity in education, providing an assessment of where OECD and partner countries stand in providing equal access to quality education at all levels. Two new indicators on the mechanisms and formulas used to allocate public funding to schools and on teacher attrition rate complement this year's edition.

English Also available in: French , German

• The State of Global Education
• Money matters for global education
• https://doi.org/10.1787/b35a14e5-en
• Click to access:
• Click to access in HTML WEB
• Click to download PDF - 7.24MB PDF
• Click to download EPUB - 64.13MB ePUB

English Also available in: French

• Click to download PDF - 405.67KB PDF

Cite this content as:

Author(s) OECD

16 Sept 2021

Typical graduation ages, by level of education (2019)

• Click to download XLS XLS

Typical age of entry, by level of education (2019)

School year and financial year used for the calculation of indicators, OECD countries

School year and financial year used for the calculation of indicators, partner countries

Starting and ending age for students in compulsory education and by level of education (2019)

Show/Hide Columns:

Featured Publication:

Report card on american education: 22nd edition.

The status quo is not working. Whether by international comparisons, state and national proficiency measures, civic literacy rates, or career preparedness, American students are falling behind. The 22nd edition of the Report Card on American Education ranks states on their K-12 education and policy performance.

Keep up-to-date on the latest campaigns & news

The World Bank Group is the largest financier of education in the developing world, working in 94 countries and committed to helping them reach SDG4: access to inclusive and equitable quality education and lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.

Education is a human right, a powerful driver of development, and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. It delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income, and is the most important factor to ensure equity and inclusion.

For individuals, education promotes employment, earnings, health, and poverty reduction. Globally, there is a  9% increase in hourly earnings for every extra year of schooling . For societies, it drives long-term economic growth, spurs innovation, strengthens institutions, and fosters social cohesion.  Education is further a powerful catalyst to climate action through widespread behavior change and skilling for green transitions.

Developing countries have made tremendous progress in getting children into the classroom and more children worldwide are now in school. But learning is not guaranteed, as the  2018 World Development Report  (WDR) stressed.

Making smart and effective investments in people’s education is critical for developing the human capital that will end extreme poverty. At the core of this strategy is the need to tackle the learning crisis, put an end to  Learning Poverty , and help youth acquire the advanced cognitive, socioemotional, technical and digital skills they need to succeed in today’s world. 

In low- and middle-income countries, the share of children living in  Learning Poverty  (that is, the proportion of 10-year-old children that are unable to read and understand a short age-appropriate text) increased from 57% before the pandemic to an estimated  70%  in 2022.

However, learning is in crisis. More than 70 million more people were pushed into poverty during the COVID pandemic, a billion children lost a year of school , and three years later the learning losses suffered have not been recouped .  If a child cannot read with comprehension by age 10, they are unlikely to become fluent readers. They will fail to thrive later in school and will be unable to power their careers and economies once they leave school.

The effects of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. Analysis has already revealed deep losses, with international reading scores declining from 2016 to 2021 by more than a year of schooling.  These losses may translate to a 0.68 percentage point in global GDP growth.  The staggering effects of school closures reach beyond learning. This generation of children could lose a combined total of  US$21 trillion in lifetime earnings  in present value or the equivalent of 17% of today’s global GDP – a sharp rise from the 2021 estimate of a US$17 trillion loss. 

Action is urgently needed now – business as usual will not suffice to heal the scars of the pandemic and will not accelerate progress enough to meet the ambitions of SDG 4. We are urging governments to implement ambitious and aggressive Learning Acceleration Programs to get children back to school, recover lost learning, and advance progress by building better, more equitable and resilient education systems.

Last Updated: Mar 25, 2024

The World Bank’s global education strategy is centered on ensuring learning happens – for everyone, everywhere. Our vision is to ensure that everyone can achieve her or his full potential with access to a quality education and lifelong learning. To reach this, we are helping countries build foundational skills like literacy, numeracy, and socioemotional skills – the building blocks for all other learning. From early childhood to tertiary education and beyond – we help children and youth acquire the skills they need to thrive in school, the labor market and throughout their lives.

Investing in the world’s most precious resource – people – is paramount to ending poverty on a livable planet.  Our experience across more than 100 countries bears out this robust connection between human capital, quality of life, and economic growth: when countries strategically invest in people and the systems designed to protect and build human capital at scale, they unlock the wealth of nations and the potential of everyone.

Building on this, the World Bank supports resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. We do this by generating and disseminating evidence, ensuring alignment with policymaking processes, and bridging the gap between research and practice.

The World Bank is the largest source of external financing for education in developing countries, with a portfolio of about $26 billion in 94 countries including IBRD, IDA and Recipient-Executed Trust Funds. IDA operations comprise 62% of the education portfolio.

The investment in FCV settings has increased dramatically and now accounts for 26% of our portfolio.

World Bank projects reach at least 425 million students -one-third of students in low- and middle-income countries.

The World Bank’s Approach to Education

Five interrelated pillars of a well-functioning education system underpin the World Bank’s education policy approach:

• Learners are prepared and motivated to learn;
• Teachers are prepared, skilled, and motivated to facilitate learning and skills acquisition;
• Learning resources (including education technology) are available, relevant, and used to improve teaching and learning;
• Schools are safe and inclusive; and
• Education Systems are well-managed, with good implementation capacity and adequate financing.

The Bank is already helping governments design and implement cost-effective programs and tools to build these pillars.

Our Principles:

• We pursue systemic reform supported by political commitment to learning for all children. 
• We focus on equity and inclusion through a progressive path toward achieving universal access to quality education, including children and young adults in fragile or conflict affected areas , those in marginalized and rural communities,  girls and women , displaced populations,  students with disabilities , and other vulnerable groups.
• We focus on results and use evidence to keep improving policy by using metrics to guide improvements.   
• We want to ensure financial commitment commensurate with what is needed to provide basic services to all. 
• We invest wisely in technology so that education systems embrace and learn to harness technology to support their learning objectives.   

Laying the groundwork for the future

Country challenges vary, but there is a menu of options to build forward better, more resilient, and equitable education systems.

Countries are facing an education crisis that requires a two-pronged approach: first, supporting actions to recover lost time through remedial and accelerated learning; and, second, building on these investments for a more equitable, resilient, and effective system.

Recovering from the learning crisis must be a political priority, backed with adequate financing and the resolve to implement needed reforms.  Domestic financing for education over the last two years has not kept pace with the need to recover and accelerate learning. Across low- and lower-middle-income countries, the  average share of education in government budgets fell during the pandemic , and in 2022 it remained below 2019 levels.

The best chance for a better future is to invest in education and make sure each dollar is put toward improving learning.  In a time of fiscal pressure, protecting spending that yields long-run gains – like spending on education – will maximize impact.  We still need more and better funding for education.  Closing the learning gap will require increasing the level, efficiency, and equity of education spending—spending smarter is an imperative.

• Education technology  can be a powerful tool to implement these actions by supporting teachers, children, principals, and parents; expanding accessible digital learning platforms, including radio/ TV / Online learning resources; and using data to identify and help at-risk children, personalize learning, and improve service delivery.

Looking ahead

We must seize this opportunity  to reimagine education in bold ways. Together, we can build forward better more equitable, effective, and resilient education systems for the world’s children and youth.

Accelerating Improvements

Supporting countries in establishing time-bound learning targets and a focused education investment plan, outlining actions and investments geared to achieve these goals.

Launched in 2020, the  Accelerator Program  works with a set of countries to channel investments in education and to learn from each other. The program coordinates efforts across partners to ensure that the countries in the program show improvements in foundational skills at scale over the next three to five years. These investment plans build on the collective work of multiple partners, and leverage the latest evidence on what works, and how best to plan for implementation.  Countries such as Brazil (the state of Ceará) and Kenya have achieved dramatic reductions in learning poverty over the past decade at scale, providing useful lessons, even as they seek to build on their successes and address remaining and new challenges.  

Universalizing Foundational Literacy

Readying children for the future by supporting acquisition of foundational skills – which are the gateway to other skills and subjects.

The  Literacy Policy Package (LPP)   consists of interventions focused specifically on promoting acquisition of reading proficiency in primary school. These include assuring political and technical commitment to making all children literate; ensuring effective literacy instruction by supporting teachers; providing quality, age-appropriate books; teaching children first in the language they speak and understand best; and fostering children’s oral language abilities and love of books and reading.

Advancing skills through TVET and Tertiary

Ensuring that individuals have access to quality education and training opportunities and supporting links to employment.

Tertiary education and skills systems are a driver of major development agendas, including human capital, climate change, youth and women’s empowerment, and jobs and economic transformation. A comprehensive skill set to succeed in the 21st century labor market consists of foundational and higher order skills, socio-emotional skills, specialized skills, and digital skills. Yet most countries continue to struggle in delivering on the promise of skills development. 

The World Bank is supporting countries through efforts that address key challenges including improving access and completion, adaptability, quality, relevance, and efficiency of skills development programs. Our approach is via multiple channels including projects, global goods, as well as the Tertiary Education and Skills Program . Our recent reports including Building Better Formal TVET Systems and STEERing Tertiary Education provide a way forward for how to improve these critical systems.

Addressing Climate Change

Mainstreaming climate education and investing in green skills, research and innovation, and green infrastructure to spur climate action and foster better preparedness and resilience to climate shocks.

Our approach recognizes that education is critical for achieving effective, sustained climate action. At the same time, climate change is adversely impacting education outcomes. Investments in education can play a huge role in building climate resilience and advancing climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate change education gives young people greater awareness of climate risks and more access to tools and solutions for addressing these risks and managing related shocks. Technical and vocational education and training can also accelerate a green economic transformation by fostering green skills and innovation. Greening education infrastructure can help mitigate the impact of heat, pollution, and extreme weather on learning, while helping address climate change. 

Examples of this work are projects in Nigeria (life skills training for adolescent girls), Vietnam (fostering relevant scientific research) , and Bangladesh (constructing and retrofitting schools to serve as cyclone shelters).

Strengthening Measurement Systems

Enabling countries to gather and evaluate information on learning and its drivers more efficiently and effectively.

The World Bank supports initiatives to help countries effectively build and strengthen their measurement systems to facilitate evidence-based decision-making. Examples of this work include:

(1) The  Global Education Policy Dashboard (GEPD) : This tool offers a strong basis for identifying priorities for investment and policy reforms that are suited to each country context by focusing on the three dimensions of practices, policies, and politics.

• Highlights gaps between what the evidence suggests is effective in promoting learning and what is happening in practice in each system; and
• Allows governments to track progress as they act to close the gaps.

The GEPD has been implemented in 13 education systems already – Peru, Rwanda, Jordan, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique, Islamabad, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sierra Leone, Niger, Gabon, Jordan and Chad – with more expected by the end of 2024.

(2)  Learning Assessment Platform (LeAP) : LeAP is a one-stop shop for knowledge, capacity-building tools, support for policy dialogue, and technical staff expertise to support student achievement measurement and national assessments for better learning.

Supporting Successful Teachers

Helping systems develop the right selection, incentives, and support to the professional development of teachers.

Currently, the World Bank Education Global Practice has over 160 active projects supporting over 18 million teachers worldwide, about a third of the teacher population in low- and middle-income countries. In 12 countries alone, these projects cover 16 million teachers, including all primary school teachers in Ethiopia and Turkey, and over 80% in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.

A World Bank-developed classroom observation tool, Teach, was designed to capture the quality of teaching in low- and middle-income countries. It is now 3.6 million students.

While Teach helps identify patterns in teacher performance, Coach leverages these insights to support teachers to improve their teaching practice through hands-on in-service teacher professional development (TPD).

Our recent report on Making Teacher Policy Work proposes a practical framework to uncover the black box of effective teacher policy and discusses the factors that enable their scalability and sustainability.

 Supporting Education Finance Systems

Strengthening country financing systems to mobilize resources for education and make better use of their investments in education.

Our approach is to bring together multi-sectoral expertise to engage with ministries of education and finance and other stakeholders to develop and implement effective and efficient public financial management systems; build capacity to monitor and evaluate education spending, identify financing bottlenecks, and develop interventions to strengthen financing systems; build the evidence base on global spending patterns and the magnitude and causes of spending inefficiencies; and develop diagnostic tools as public goods to support country efforts.

Working in Fragile, Conflict, and Violent (FCV) Contexts

The massive and growing global challenge of having so many children living in conflict and violent situations requires a response at the same scale and scope. Our education engagement in the Fragility, Conflict and Violence (FCV) context, which stands at US$5.35 billion, has grown rapidly in recent years, reflecting the ever-increasing importance of the FCV agenda in education. Indeed, these projects now account for more than 25% of the World Bank education portfolio.

Education is crucial to minimizing the effects of fragility and displacement on the welfare of youth and children in the short-term and preventing the emergence of violent conflict in the long-term. 

Support to Countries Throughout the Education Cycle

Our support to countries covers the entire learning cycle, to help shape resilient, equitable, and inclusive education systems that ensure learning happens for everyone. 

The ongoing  Supporting  Egypt  Education Reform project , 2018-2025, supports transformational reforms of the Egyptian education system, by improving teaching and learning conditions in public schools. The World Bank has invested $500 million in the project focused on increasing access to quality kindergarten, enhancing the capacity of teachers and education leaders, developing a reliable student assessment system, and introducing the use of modern technology for teaching and learning. Specifically, the share of Egyptian 10-year-old students, who could read and comprehend at the global minimum proficiency level, increased to 45 percent in 2021.

In  Nigeria , the $75 million  Edo  Basic Education Sector and Skills Transformation (EdoBESST)  project, running from 2020-2024, is focused on improving teaching and learning in basic education. Under the project, which covers 97 percent of schools in the state, there is a strong focus on incorporating digital technologies for teachers. They were equipped with handheld tablets with structured lesson plans for their classes. Their coaches use classroom observation tools to provide individualized feedback. Teacher absence has reduced drastically because of the initiative. Over 16,000 teachers were trained through the project, and the introduction of technology has also benefited students.

Through the $235 million  School Sector Development Program  in  Nepal  (2017-2022), the number of children staying in school until Grade 12 nearly tripled, and the number of out-of-school children fell by almost seven percent. During the pandemic, innovative approaches were needed to continue education. Mobile phone penetration is high in the country. More than four in five households in Nepal have mobile phones. The project supported an educational service that made it possible for children with phones to connect to local radio that broadcast learning programs.

From 2017-2023, the $50 million  Strengthening of State Universities  in  Chile  project has made strides to improve quality and equity at state universities. The project helped reduce dropout: the third-year dropout rate fell by almost 10 percent from 2018-2022, keeping more students in school.

The World Bank’s first  Program-for-Results financing in education  was through a $202 million project in  Tanzania , that ran from 2013-2021. The project linked funding to results and aimed to improve education quality. It helped build capacity, and enhanced effectiveness and efficiency in the education sector. Through the project, learning outcomes significantly improved alongside an unprecedented expansion of access to education for children in Tanzania. From 2013-2019, an additional 1.8 million students enrolled in primary schools. In 2019, the average reading speed for Grade 2 students rose to 22.3 words per minute, up from 17.3 in 2017. The project laid the foundation for the ongoing $500 million  BOOST project , which supports over 12 million children to enroll early, develop strong foundational skills, and complete a quality education.

The $40 million  Cambodia  Secondary Education Improvement project , which ran from 2017-2022, focused on strengthening school-based management, upgrading teacher qualifications, and building classrooms in Cambodia, to improve learning outcomes, and reduce student dropout at the secondary school level. The project has directly benefited almost 70,000 students in 100 target schools, and approximately 2,000 teachers and 600 school administrators received training.

The World Bank is co-financing the $152.80 million  Yemen  Restoring Education and Learning Emergency project , running from 2020-2024, which is implemented through UNICEF, WFP, and Save the Children. It is helping to maintain access to basic education for many students, improve learning conditions in schools, and is working to strengthen overall education sector capacity. In the time of crisis, the project is supporting teacher payments and teacher training, school meals, school infrastructure development, and the distribution of learning materials and school supplies. To date, almost 600,000 students have benefited from these interventions.

The $87 million  Providing an Education of Quality in  Haiti  project supported approximately 380 schools in the Southern region of Haiti from 2016-2023. Despite a highly challenging context of political instability and recurrent natural disasters, the project successfully supported access to education for students. The project provided textbooks, fresh meals, and teacher training support to 70,000 students, 3,000 teachers, and 300 school directors. It gave tuition waivers to 35,000 students in 118 non-public schools. The project also repaired 19 national schools damaged by the 2021 earthquake, which gave 5,500 students safe access to their schools again.

In 2013, just 5% of the poorest households in  Uzbekistan  had children enrolled in preschools. Thanks to the  Improving Pre-Primary and General Secondary Education Project , by July 2019, around 100,000 children will have benefitted from the half-day program in 2,420 rural kindergartens, comprising around 49% of all preschool educational institutions, or over 90% of rural kindergartens in the country.

In addition to working closely with governments in our client countries, the World Bank also works at the global, regional, and local levels with a range of technical partners, including foundations, non-profit organizations, bilaterals, and other multilateral organizations. Some examples of our most recent global partnerships include:

UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  Coalition for Foundational Learning

The World Bank is working closely with UNICEF, UNESCO, FCDO, USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as the  Coalition for Foundational Learning  to advocate and provide technical support to ensure foundational learning.  The World Bank works with these partners to promote and endorse the  Commitment to Action on Foundational Learning , a global network of countries committed to halving the global share of children unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10 by 2030.

Australian Aid, Bernard van Leer Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Canada, Echida Giving, FCDO, German Cooperation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, Conrad Hilton Foundation, LEGO Foundation, Porticus, USAID: Early Learning Partnership

The Early Learning Partnership (ELP) is a multi-donor trust fund, housed at the World Bank.  ELP leverages World Bank strengths—a global presence, access to policymakers and strong technical analysis—to improve early learning opportunities and outcomes for young children around the world.

We help World Bank teams and countries get the information they need to make the case to invest in Early Childhood Development (ECD), design effective policies and deliver impactful programs. At the country level, ELP grants provide teams with resources for early seed investments that can generate large financial commitments through World Bank finance and government resources. At the global level, ELP research and special initiatives work to fill knowledge gaps, build capacity and generate public goods.

UNESCO, UNICEF:  Learning Data Compact

UNESCO, UNICEF, and the World Bank have joined forces to close the learning data gaps that still exist and that preclude many countries from monitoring the quality of their education systems and assessing if their students are learning. The three organizations have agreed to a  Learning Data Compact , a commitment to ensure that all countries, especially low-income countries, have at least one quality measure of learning by 2025, supporting coordinated efforts to strengthen national assessment systems.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS):   Learning Poverty Indicator

Aimed at measuring and urging attention to foundational literacy as a prerequisite to achieve SDG4, this partnership was launched in 2019 to help countries strengthen their learning assessment systems, better monitor what students are learning in internationally comparable ways and improve the breadth and quality of global data on education.

FCDO, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:  EdTech Hub

Supported by the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the EdTech Hub is aimed at improving the quality of ed-tech investments. The Hub launched a rapid response Helpdesk service to provide just-in-time advisory support to 70 low- and middle-income countries planning education technology and remote learning initiatives.

MasterCard Foundation

Our Tertiary Education and Skills  global program, launched with support from the Mastercard Foundation, aims to prepare youth and adults for the future of work and society by improving access to relevant, quality, equitable reskilling and post-secondary education opportunities.  It is designed to reframe, reform, and rebuild tertiary education and skills systems for the digital and green transformation.

Choosing our Future: Education for Climate Action

Bridging the AI divide: Breaking down barriers to ensure women’s leadership and participation in the Fifth Industrial Revolution

Common challenges and tailored solutions: How policymakers are strengthening early learning systems across the world

Compulsory education boosts learning outcomes and climate action

Areas of focus.

Data & Measurement

Early Childhood Development

Financing Education

Foundational Learning

Fragile, Conflict & Violent Contexts

Girls’ Education

Inclusive Education

Skills Development

Technology (EdTech)  

Tertiary Education

Initiatives

• Show More +
• Invest in Childcare
• Global Education Policy Dashboard
• Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel
• Show Less -

Collapse and Recovery: How the COVID-19 Pandemic Eroded Human Capital and What to Do About It

BROCHURES & FACT SHEETS

Flyer: Education Factsheet - May 2024

Publication: Realizing Education's Promise: A World Bank Retrospective – August 2023

Flyer: Education and Climate Change - November 2022

Brochure: Learning Losses - October 2022

STAY CONNECTED

Human Development Topics

Around the bank group.

Find out what the Bank Group's branches are doing in education

Global Education Newsletter - June 2024

What's happening in the World Bank Education Global Practice? Read to learn more.

Learning Can't Wait: A commitment to education in Latin America and the ...

A new IDB-World Bank report describes challenges and priorities to address the educational crisis.

Human Capital Project

The Human Capital Project is a global effort to accelerate more and better investments in people for greater equity and economic growth.

Impact Evaluations

Research that measures the impact of education policies to improve education in low and middle income countries.

Education Videos

Watch our latest videos featuring our projects across the world

Additional Resources

Skills & Workforce Development

Technology (EdTech)

This site uses cookies to optimize functionality and give you the best possible experience. If you continue to navigate this website beyond this page, cookies will be placed on your browser. To learn more about cookies, click here .

The State of Education: Rebuilding a More Equitable System

Covid-19 has exposed long-standing inequities in america’s education system..

The pandemic’s toll on our education system has had a broader effect on academic regressions than initially predicted. And the most vulnerable learners—students of color, those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and students with additional learning needs—have been impacted the most. While the pandemic has exacerbated existing disparities, it’s also presented a unique opportunity to dramatically overhaul our education system.

We convened education advocates and practitioners, from both K–12 and higher education, to explain how the disruption of the pandemic is pushing forward long-overdue pedagogical reform. And we outlined the innovative solutions that should be implemented to create an equitable learning environment for all students.

Atlantic subscribers enjoy access to exclusive sessions and experiences.

Sign up to receive updates.

Subject to The Atlantic's Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions .

Underwritten by

Dr. Mildred García

President, American Association of State Colleges and Universities

Adam Harris

Staff writer, The Atlantic

Dr. John B. King, Jr.

President and CEO, The Education Trust

Dr. Sonja Santelises

CEO, Baltimore City Schools

Susan Saulny

Contributor, AtlanticLIVE

Agenda Mar 3

Virtual or in-person.

Virtual / In-Person

Where Does Education Reform Go from Here?

A session presented by bill & melinda gates foundation.

Produced by our underwriter and not The Atlantic ’s editorial team.

Implementing Solutions

Closing remarks, event details, virtual event.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

1:00 pm EDT

Subscribe to The Atlantic

Unlock unlimited access to The Atlantic, including exclusive events for subscribers. Join us today and help ensure a bright future for independent journalism.

Related Events

The education summit.

October 27, 2022 Washington, D.C. or Virtual

October 26, 2021 Virtual Event

May 14, 2019 Washington, D.C.

Education Summit 2018

May 1, 2018 Washington, D.C.

• Create Account

Understanding the American Education System

The American education system offers a rich field of choices for international students. There is such an array of schools, programs and locations that the choices may overwhelm students, even those from the U.S. As you begin your school search, it’s important to familiarize yourself with the American education system. Understanding the system will help you narrow your choices and develop your education plan.

The Educational Structure

Primary and secondary school.

Prior to higher education, American students attend primary and secondary school for a combined total of 12 years. These years are referred to as the first through twelfth grades.

Around age six, U.S. children begin primary school, which is most commonly called “elementary school.” They attend five or six years and then go onto secondary school.

Secondary school consists of two programs: the first is “middle school” or “junior high school” and the second program is “high school.” A diploma or certificate is awarded upon graduation from high school. After graduating high school (12th grade), U.S. students may go on to college or university. College or university study is known as “higher education.”

Grading System

Just like American students, you will have to submit your academic transcripts as part of your application for admission to university or college. Academic transcripts are official copies of your academic work. In the U.S. this includes your “grades” and “grade point average” (GPA), which are measurements of your academic achievement. Courses are commonly graded using percentages, which are converted into letter grades.

The grading system and GPA in the U.S. can be confusing, especially for international students. The interpretation of grades has a lot of variation. For example, two students who attended different schools both submit their transcripts to the same university. They both have 3.5 GPAs, but one student attended an average high school, while the other attended a prestigious school that was academically challenging. The university might interpret their GPAs differently because the two schools have dramatically different standards.

Therefore, there are some crucial things to keep in mind:

• You should find out the U.S. equivalent of the last level of education you completed in your home country.
• Pay close attention to the admission requirements of each university and college, as well as individual degree programs, which may have different requirements than the university.
• Regularly meet with an educational advisor or guidance counselor to make sure you are meeting the requirements.

Your educational advisor or guidance counselor will be able to advise you on whether or not you must spend an extra year or two preparing for U.S. university admission. If an international student entered a U.S. university or college prior to being eligible to attend university in their own country, some countries’ governments and employers may not recognize the students’ U.S. education.

Academic Year

The school calendar usually begins in August or September and continues through May or June. The majority of new students begin in autumn, so it is a good idea for international students to also begin their U.S. university studies at this time. There is a lot of excitement at the beginning of the school year and students form many great friendships during this time, as they are all adjusting to a new phase of academic life. Additionally, many courses are designed for students to take them in sequence, starting in autumn and continuing through the year.

The academic year at many schools is composed of two terms called “semesters.” (Some schools use a three-term calendar known as the “trimester” system.) Still, others further divide the year into the quarter system of four terms, including an optional summer session. Basically, if you exclude the summer session, the academic year is either comprised of two semesters or three quarter terms.

The U.S. Higher Education System: Levels of Study

• First Level: Undergraduate

"The American system is much more open. In Hong Kong you just learn what the teacher writes on the board. In America, you discuss the issues and focus more on ideas."

Paolo Kwan from Hong Kong: Studying English and Business Administration at Sierra College in California

A student who is attending a college or university and has not earned a bachelor’s degree, is studying at the undergraduate level. It typically takes about four years to earn a bachelor’s degree. You can either begin your studies in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree at a community college or a four-year university or college.

Your first two years of study you will generally be required to take a wide variety of classes in different subjects, commonly known as prerequisite courses: literature, science, the social sciences, the arts, history, and so forth. This is so you achieve a general knowledge, a foundation, of a variety of subjects prior to focusing on a specific field of study.

Many students choose to study at a community college in order to complete the first two years of prerequisite courses. They will earn an Associate of Arts (AA) transfer degree and then transfer to a four-year university or college.

A “major” is the specific field of study in which your degree is focused. For example, if someone’s major is journalism, they will earn a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. You will be required to take a certain number of courses in this field in order to meet the degree requirements of your major. You must choose your major at the beginning of your third year of school.

A very unique characteristic of the American higher education system is that you can change your major multiple times if you choose. It is extremely common for American students to switch majors at some point in their undergraduate studies. Often, students discover a different field that they excel in or enjoy. The American education system is very flexible. Keep in mind though that switching majors may result in more courses, which means more time and money.

• Second Level: Graduate in Pursuit of a Master’s Degree

Presently, a college or university graduate with a bachelor’s degree may want to seriously think about graduate study in order to enter certain professions or advance their career. This degree is usually mandatory for higher-level positions in library science, engineering, behavioral health and education.

Furthermore, international students from some countries are only permitted to study abroad at a graduate level. You should inquire about the credentials needed to get a job in your country before you apply to a postgraduate university in the USA.

A graduate program is usually a division of a university or college. To gain admission, you will need to take the GRE (graduate record examination). Certain master’s programs require specific tests, such as the LSAT for law school, the GRE or GMAT for business school, and the MCAT for medical school.

Graduate programs in pursuit of a master’s degree typically take one to two years to complete. For example, the MBA (master of business administration) is an extremely popular degree program that takes about two years. Other master’s programs, such as journalism, only take one year.

The majority of a master’s program is spent in classroom study and a graduate student must prepare a long research paper called a “master’s thesis” or complete a “master’s project.”

• Third Level: Graduate in Pursuit of a Doctorate Degree

Many graduate schools consider the attainment of a master’s degree the first step towards earning a PhD (doctorate). But at other schools, students may prepare directly for a doctorate without also earning a master’s degree. It may take three years or more to earn a PhD degree. For international students, it may take as long as five or six years.

For the first two years of the program most doctoral candidates enroll in classes and seminars. At least another year is spent conducting firsthand research and writing a thesis or dissertation. This paper must contain views, designs, or research that have not been previously published.

A doctoral dissertation is a discussion and summary of the current scholarship on a given topic. Most U.S. universities awarding doctorates also require their candidates to have a reading knowledge of two foreign languages, to spend a required length of time “in residence,” to pass a qualifying examination that officially admits candidates to the PhD program, and to pass an oral examination on the same topic as the dissertation.

Characteristics of the U.S. Higher Education System

Classroom Environment

Classes range from large lectures with several hundred students to smaller classes and seminars (discussion classes) with only a few students. The American university classroom atmosphere is very dynamic. You will be expected to share your opinion, argue your point, participate in class discussions and give presentations. International students find this one of the most surprising aspects of the American education system.

Each week professors usually assign textbook and other readings. You will be expected to keep up-to-date with the required readings and homework so you can participate in class discussions and understand the lectures. Certain degree programs also require students to spend time in the laboratory.

Professors issue grades for each student enrolled in the course. Grades are usually based upon:

• Each professor will have a unique set of class participation requirements, but students are expected to participate in class discussions, especially in seminar classes. This is often a very important factor in determining a student’s grade.
• A midterm examination is usually given during class time.
• One or more research or term papers , or laboratory reports must be submitted for evaluation.
• Possible short exams or quizzes are given. Sometimes professors will give an unannounced “pop quiz.” This doesn’t count heavily toward the grade, but is intended to inspire students to keep up with their assignments and attendance.
• A final examination will be held after the final class meeting.

Each course is worth a certain number of credits or credit hours. This number is roughly the same as the number of hours a student spends in class for that course each week. A course is typically worth three to five credits.

A full-time program at most schools is 12 or 15 credit hours (four or five courses per term) and a certain number of credits must be fulfilled in order to graduate. International students are expected to enroll in a full-time program during each term.

If a student enrolls at a new university before finishing a degree, generally most credits earned at the first school can be used to complete a degree at the new university. This means a student can transfer to another university and still graduate within a reasonable time.

Types of U.S. higher education

Xujie Zhao from China: Studying Computer Networking at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston

1. State College or University

A state school is supported and run by a state or local government. Each of the 50 U.S. states operates at least one state university and possibly several state colleges. Many of these public universities schools have the name of the state, or the actual word “State” in their names: for example, Washington State University and the University of Michigan.

2. Private College or University

These schools are privately run as opposed to being run by a branch of the government. Tuition will usually be higher than state schools. Often, private U.S. universities and colleges are smaller in size than state schools.

Religiously affiliated universities and colleges are private schools. Nearly all these schools welcome students of all religions and beliefs. Yet, there are a percentage of schools that prefer to admit students who hold similar religious beliefs as those in which the school was founded.

3. Community College

Community colleges are two-year colleges that award an associate’s degrees (transferable), as well as certifications. There are many types of associate degrees, but the most important distinguishing factor is whether or not the degree is transferable. Usually, there will be two primary degree tracks: one for academic transfer and the other prepares students to enter the workforce straightaway. University transfer degrees are generally associate of arts or associate of science. Not likely to be transferrable are the associate of applied science degrees and certificates of completion.

Community college graduates most commonly transfer to four-year colleges or universities to complete their degree. Because they can transfer the credits they earned while attending community college, they can complete their bachelor’s degree program in two or more additional years. Many also offer ESL or intensive English language programs, which will prepare students for university-level courses.

If you do not plan to earn a higher degree than the associate’s, you should find out if an associate’s degree will qualify you for a job in your home country.

4. Institute of Technology

An institute of technology is a school that provides at least four years of study in science and technology. Some have graduate programs, while others offer short-term courses.

Study in the USA ®

Get matched to the best program for you.

Let us know what you're looking for so we can find the best school for you.

Useful Articles

Check Out These Schools

College of Central Florida

$5,000—$10,000 Semester

Saybrook University

$10,000 — $15,000 Semester

College of Staten Island of the City University of New York

Featured programs.

Golden West College

Typical cost per Year: $5,000—$10,000

Truckee Meadows Community College

Typical cost per Semester: $5,000—$10,000

Glendale Community College

Related stories.

Start your U.S. adventure with Study in the USA

Learn About U.S. education financing, housing, and more

BetterHelp is the world’s largest therapy service, and it’s 100% online. You get the same professionalism and quality you expect from in-office therapy, but with access to a huge network of therapists, more scheduling flexibility, and at a more affor...

Ready to take your language learning to the next level? Have you heard about TutorABC, the World's No. 1 Online Platform for Learning English and Chinese? TutorABC is recognized as the top language platform, harnessing innovative technology to offe...

A world of greater possibility.

Follow your dreams with the TOEFL iBT® test, which has helped millions of students study abroad.

Learn about American culture and education direct from our experts at Study in the USA. Read more

Achieving Your Goal

Admissions and placement testing, beyond the basics, education system in the usa, financing your u.s. education, frequently asked questions, life in the usa, student experiences, for students age 10-18, study in canada, student voices, ask studyusa.com, subscribe to get the latest from study in the usa.

You can unsubscribe at any time.

• International Peace and Security
• Higher Education and Research in Africa
• Andrew Carnegie Fellows
• Great Immigrants
• Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy
• Reporting Requirements
• Modification Requests
• Communications FAQs
• Grants Database
• Philanthropic Resources
• Grantee FAQs
• Grantmaking Highlights
• Past Presidents
• The Gospel of Wealth
• Other Carnegie Organizations
• Andrew Carnegie’s Story
• Governance and Policies
• Media Center

What Changes to the U.S. Education System Are Needed to Support Long-Term Success for All Americans?

With the pandemic deepening inequities that threaten students’ prospects, the vice president of the Corporation’s National Program provides a vision for transforming our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures 

At no point in our nation’s history have we asked so much of our education system as we do today. We ask that our primary and secondary schools prepare all students, regardless of background, for a lifetime of learning. We ask that teachers guide every child toward deeper understanding while simultaneously attending to their social-emotional development. And we ask that our institutions of higher learning serve students with a far broader range of life circumstances than ever before.

We ask these things of education because the future we aspire to requires it. The nature of work and civic participation is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Advances in automation, artificial intelligence, and social media are driving rapid changes in how we interact with each other and what skills hold value. In the world our children will inherit, their ability to adapt, think critically, and work effectively with others will be essential for both their own success and the well-being of society.

At Carnegie Corporation of New York, we focus on supporting people who are in a position to meet this challenge. That includes the full spectrum of educators, administrators, family members, and others who shape young people’s learning experiences as they progress toward and into adulthood. Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

All of our work is geared toward transforming student learning. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions required for success today call for a vastly different set of learning experiences than may have sufficed in the past. Students must play a more active role in their own learning, and that learning must encompass more than subject-matter knowledge. Preparing all children for success requires greater attention to inclusiveness in the classroom, differentiation in teaching and learning, and universal high expectations.

This transformation needs to happen in higher education as well. A high school education is no longer enough to ensure financial security. We need more high-quality postsecondary options, better guidance for students as they transition beyond high school, and sufficient supports to enable all students to complete their postsecondary programs. Preparing students for lifelong success requires stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and work.

The need for such transformation has become all the more urgent in the face of COVID-19. As with past economic crises, the downturn resulting from the pandemic is likely to accelerate the erosion of opportunities for low-skilled workers with only a high school education. Investments in innovative learning models and student supports are critical to preventing further inequities in learning outcomes. 

An Urgent Call for Advancing Equity 

The 2020–21 school year may prove to be the most consequential in American history. With unfathomable speed, COVID-19 has forced more change in how schools operate than in the previous half century.

What is most concerning in all of this is the impact on the most underserved and historically marginalized in our society: low-income children and students of color. Even before the current crisis, the future prospects of a young person today looked very different depending on the color of her skin and the zip code in which she grew up, but the pandemic exposed and exacerbated long-standing racial and economic inequities. And the same families who are faring worst in terms of disrupted schooling are bearing the brunt of the economic downturn and disproportionately getting sick, being hospitalized, and dying.

Our mission is to empower all students with the tools, systems, knowledge, and mindsets to prepare them to fully participate in the global economy and in a robust democracy.

Every organization that is committed to educational improvement needs to ask itself what it can do differently to further advance the cause of educational equity during this continuing crisis so that we can make lasting improvements. As we know from past experience, if the goal of equity is not kept front and center, those who are already behind through no fault of their own will benefit the least. If ever there were a time to heed this caution, it is now.

We hope that our nation will approach education with a new sense of purpose and a shared commitment to ensuring that our schools truly work for every child. Whether or not that happens will depend on our resolve and our actions in the coming months. We have the proof points and know-how to transform learning, bolster instruction, and meet the needs of our most disadvantaged students. What has changed is the urgency for doing so at scale.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have. We need to reimagine the systems that shape student learning and put the communities whose circumstances we most need to elevate at the center of that process. We need to recognize that we will not improve student outcomes without building the capacity of the adults who work with them, supporting them with high-quality resources and meaningful opportunities for collaboration and professional growth. We need to promote stronger connections between K–12, higher education, and employment so that all students are prepared for lifelong success.

The pandemic has deepened inequities that threaten students’ prospects. But if we seize this moment and learn from it, if we marshal the necessary resources, we have the potential to transform our education system from one characterized by uneven and unjust results to one that puts all students on a path to bright futures.

In a pandemic-induced moment when the American education system has been blown into 25 million homes across the country, where do we go from here?

We Must Learn to Act in New Ways

These are not controversial ideas. In fact, they constitute the general consensus about where American education needs to go. But they also represent a tall order for the people who influence the system. Practically everyone who plays a part in education must learn to act in new ways.

That we have made progress in such areas as high school completion, college-going rates, and the adoption of college- and career-ready standards is a testament to the commitment of those working in the field. But it will take more than commitment to achieve the changes in student learning that our times demand. We can’t expect individuals to figure out what they need to do on their own, nor should we be surprised if they struggle to do so when working in institutional structures designed to produce different outcomes. The transformation we seek calls for much greater coordination and a broader set of allies than would suffice for more incremental changes.

Our starting place must be a vision of equal opportunity, and from there we must create the conditions that can actually ensure it — irrespective of how different they may look from the ones we now have.

Our best hope for achieving equity and the transformation of student learning is to enhance adults’ ability to contribute to that learning. That means building their capacity while supporting their authentic engagement in promoting a high-quality education for every child. It also means ensuring that people operate within systems that are optimized to support their effectiveness and that a growing body of knowledge informs their efforts.

These notions comprise our overarching strategy for promoting the systems change needed to transform student learning experiences on a large scale. We seek to enhance adult capacity and stakeholder engagement in the service of ensuring that all students are prepared to meet the demands of the 21st century. We also support knowledge development and organizational improvement to the extent that investments in these areas enhance adult capacity, stakeholder engagement, and student experiences.

Five Ways We Invest in the Future of Students

These views on how best to promote systems change in education guide our philanthropic work. The strategic areas of change we focus on are major themes throughout our five investment portfolios. Although they are managed separately and support different types of initiatives, each seeks to address its area of focus from multiple angles. A single portfolio may include grants that build adult capacity, enhance stakeholder engagement, and generate new knowledge.

New Designs to Advance Learning

Preparing all students for success requires that we fundamentally reimagine our nation’s schools and classrooms. Our public education system needs to catch up with how the world is evolving and with what we’ve come to understand about how people learn. That means attending to a broader diversity of learning styles and bringing what happens in school into greater alignment with what happens in the worlds of work and civic life. We make investments to increase the number of innovative learning models that support personalized experiences, academic mastery, and positive youth development. We also make investments that build the capacity of districts and intermediaries to improve learning experiences for all students as well as grants to investigate relevant issues of policy and practice.

Pathways to Postsecondary Success

Lifelong success in the United States has never been more dependent on educational attainment than it is today. Completing some education beyond the 12th grade has virtually become a necessity for financial security and meaningful work. But for that possibility to exist for everyone, we need to address the historical barriers that keep many students from pursuing and completing a postsecondary program, and we must strengthen the options available to all students for education after high school. Through our investments, we seek to increase the number of young people able to access and complete a postsecondary program, with a major focus on removing historical barriers for students who are first-generation college-goers, low-income, or from underrepresented groups. We also look to expand the range of high-quality postsecondary options and to strengthen alignment between K–12, higher education, and the world of work.

Leadership and Teaching to Advance Learning

At its core, learning is about the interplay between teachers, students, and content. How teachers and students engage with each other and with their curriculum plays a predominant role in determining what students learn and how well they learn it. That’s not to say that factors outside of school don’t also greatly impact student learning. But the research is clear that among the factors a school might control, nothing outweighs the teaching that students experience. We focus on supporting educators in implementing rigorous college- and career-ready standards in math, science, and English language arts. We make investments to increase the supply of and demand for high-quality curricular materials and professional learning experiences for teachers and administrators.

Public Understanding

As central as they are to the education process, school professionals are hardly the only people with a critical role to play in student learning. Students spend far more time with family and other community members than they do at school. And numerous stakeholders outside of the education system have the potential to strengthen and shape what happens within it. The success of our nation’s schools depends on far more individuals than are employed by them. 

We invest in efforts to engage families and other stakeholders as active partners in supporting equitable access to high-quality student learning. We also support media organizations and policy research groups in building awareness about key issues related to educational equity and improvement.

Integration, Learning, and Innovation

Those of us who work for change in education need a new set of habits to achieve our vision of 21st-century learning. It will take more than a factory-model mindset to transform our education system into one that prepares all learners for an increasingly complex world. We must approach this task with flexibility, empathy for the people involved, and an understanding of how to learn from what’s working and what’s not. We work to reduce the fragmentation, inefficiencies, and missteps that often result when educational improvement strategies are pursued in isolation and without an understanding of the contexts in which they are implemented. Through grants and other activities, we build the capacity of people working in educational organizations to change how they work by emphasizing systems and design thinking, iteration, and knowledge sharing within and across organizations.

Two recent surveys by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Gallup offer insights into how our education system can better help all Americans navigate job and career choices

Join Us in This Ambitious Endeavor

Our approach of supporting multiple stakeholders by pulling multiple levers is informed by our deep understanding of the system we’re trying to move. American education is a massive, diverse, and highly decentralized enterprise. There is no mechanism by which we might affect more than superficial change in many thousands of communities. The type of change that is needed cannot come from compliance alone. It requires that everyone grapple with new ideas.

We know from our history of promoting large-scale improvements in American education that advancements won’t happen overnight or as the result of one kind of initiative. Our vision for 21st-century education will require more than quick wins and isolated successes. Innovation is essential, and a major thrust of our work involves the incubation and dissemination of new models, resources, and exemplars. But we must also learn to move forward with the empathy, flexibility, and systems thinking needed to support people in making the transition. Novel solutions only help if they can be successfully implemented in different contexts.

Only a sustained and concerted effort will shift the center of gravity of a social enterprise that involves millions of adults and many tens of millions of young people. The challenge of philanthropy is to effect widespread social change with limited resources and without formal authority. This takes more than grantmaking. At the Corporation, we convene, communicate, and form coalitions. We provide thought leadership, issue challenges, and launch new initiatives. Through these multifaceted activities, we maximize our ability to forge, share, and put into practice powerful new ideas that build a foundation for more substantial changes in the future.

We encourage everyone who plays a role in education to join us in this work. Our strategy represents more than our priorities as a grantmaker. It conveys our strong beliefs about how to get American education to where it needs to be. The more organizations and individuals we have supporting those who are working to provide students with what they need, the more likely we are to succeed in this ambitious endeavor. 

LaVerne Evans Srinivasan is the vice president of Carnegie Corporation of New York’s National Program and the program director for Education.

TOP: Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, a lower-school substitute teacher works from her home in Arlington, Virginia, on April 1, 2020. Her role in the school changed significantly due to the pandemic. Whereas she previously worked part-time to support teachers when they needed to be absent from the classroom, amid COVID-19 she now helps teachers to build skills with new digital platforms so they can continue to teach in the best way for their students and their families. (Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images)

In the “RV Capital of the World,” CareerWise Elkhart County connects high school students to apprenticeships designed to create a pipeline of talent in a wide range of fields facing staff shortages 

With the philanthropic support of Carnegie Corporation of New York, thousands of newly digitized, high-quality images of medieval manuscripts are now freely available to the public

Education System

An education system is an arrangement that consists of at least one teacher and one student in a context, such as in a tutorial or via Skype. Education systems must be intentional, where a teacher actively attempts to guide student learning. Education systems encompass all institutions that are concerned with educating students who are in K-12 and higher education. For students, the education system encompasses elementary school, middle school, high school and then college or university. Many often wonder who created the U.S. education system. The U.S. education system wasn’t created by a single individual but rather evolved over time through the contributions of various educational reformers , lawmakers, and social movements. Key figures in its development include: Horace Mann, often referred to as the “Father of the American Public School System,” Thomas Jefferson, who firmly believed that education citizenry was essential for the success of the republic and John Dewey, who promoted progressive education and advocated for experiential learning.

An education system refers to the economic and social factors that typically make up public schools at the federal, state or community levels. Such factors include public funding, school facilities, staffing, compensation, employee benefits, teaching resources and more. Education systems refer to the coordination of individuals (among teachers, administrators and students), infrastructure (including safe facilities and transportation) and functioning institutions and processes. Many institutions adopted online education systems in March 2020 in light of emergency remote teaching due to COVID-19. The online education system meant students could learn from anywhere in the world from their personal devices. The cons to online education systems include limited social interaction among peers and fewer opportunities for hands-on learning.

An education system encompasses the structure and opportunities for education within a country, including institutions from family and early childhood education through kindergarten, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools, such as lyceums, colleges, and universities. It also covers continuous professional and personal education and private educational institutions. While regulated by national laws, some aspects may be unregulated, aiming to provide education for all societal sections. UNESCO’s International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) recognizes nine education levels . These include 0. Early childhood education, 1. Primary education, 2. Lower secondary education, 3. Upper secondary education, 4. Post-secondary non-tertiary education, 5. Short-cycle tertiary education, 6. Bachelor’s or equivalent level, 7. Master’s or equivalent level and 8. Doctoral or equivalent level.

In the U.S. education system , students earn credits for courses, which count towards completing their program. Courses are categorized into “core” subjects for foundational knowledge, “major” courses for specialization, and “elective” courses for exploring other interests. The U.S. education system calendar runs from September to May, divided into two semesters of 16–18 weeks, though some institutions use a quarter or trimester system of 10–12 weeks. With a wide range of higher education options, students can find programs that meet their academic, financial, and personal needs. In the context of higher education, nearly 4,000 accredited institutions make up the U.S. education system .

Product Overview

Teaching resources, further reading.

9 Pedagogical Approaches for Higher Ed Explained [Plus: 40+ Free Strategies to Implement in Your Classroom]

Curriculum Development and the 3 Models [+ Free Course Plan Template]

More terms starting with e, the new higher ed value equation.

Discover what it takes to meet the evolving needs and expectations of today’s students.

What Is Education For?

Read an excerpt from a new book by Sir Ken Robinson and Kate Robinson, which calls for redesigning education for the future.

Your content has been saved!

What is education for? As it happens, people differ sharply on this question. It is what is known as an “essentially contested concept.” Like “democracy” and “justice,” “education” means different things to different people. Various factors can contribute to a person’s understanding of the purpose of education, including their background and circumstances. It is also inflected by how they view related issues such as ethnicity, gender, and social class. Still, not having an agreed-upon definition of education doesn’t mean we can’t discuss it or do anything about it.

We just need to be clear on terms. There are a few terms that are often confused or used interchangeably—“learning,” “education,” “training,” and “school”—but there are important differences between them. Learning is the process of acquiring new skills and understanding. Education is an organized system of learning. Training is a type of education that is focused on learning specific skills. A school is a community of learners: a group that comes together to learn with and from each other. It is vital that we differentiate these terms: children love to learn, they do it naturally; many have a hard time with education, and some have big problems with school.

There are many assumptions of compulsory education. One is that young people need to know, understand, and be able to do certain things that they most likely would not if they were left to their own devices. What these things are and how best to ensure students learn them are complicated and often controversial issues. Another assumption is that compulsory education is a preparation for what will come afterward, like getting a good job or going on to higher education.

So, what does it mean to be educated now? Well, I believe that education should expand our consciousness, capabilities, sensitivities, and cultural understanding. It should enlarge our worldview. As we all live in two worlds—the world within you that exists only because you do, and the world around you—the core purpose of education is to enable students to understand both worlds. In today’s climate, there is also a new and urgent challenge: to provide forms of education that engage young people with the global-economic issues of environmental well-being.

This core purpose of education can be broken down into four basic purposes.

Education should enable young people to engage with the world within them as well as the world around them. In Western cultures, there is a firm distinction between the two worlds, between thinking and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity. This distinction is misguided. There is a deep correlation between our experience of the world around us and how we feel. As we explored in the previous chapters, all individuals have unique strengths and weaknesses, outlooks and personalities. Students do not come in standard physical shapes, nor do their abilities and personalities. They all have their own aptitudes and dispositions and different ways of understanding things. Education is therefore deeply personal. It is about cultivating the minds and hearts of living people. Engaging them as individuals is at the heart of raising achievement.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasizes that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” and that “Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Many of the deepest problems in current systems of education result from losing sight of this basic principle.

Schools should enable students to understand their own cultures and to respect the diversity of others. There are various definitions of culture, but in this context the most appropriate is “the values and forms of behavior that characterize different social groups.” To put it more bluntly, it is “the way we do things around here.” Education is one of the ways that communities pass on their values from one generation to the next. For some, education is a way of preserving a culture against outside influences. For others, it is a way of promoting cultural tolerance. As the world becomes more crowded and connected, it is becoming more complex culturally. Living respectfully with diversity is not just an ethical choice, it is a practical imperative.

There should be three cultural priorities for schools: to help students understand their own cultures, to understand other cultures, and to promote a sense of cultural tolerance and coexistence. The lives of all communities can be hugely enriched by celebrating their own cultures and the practices and traditions of other cultures.

Education should enable students to become economically responsible and independent. This is one of the reasons governments take such a keen interest in education: they know that an educated workforce is essential to creating economic prosperity. Leaders of the Industrial Revolution knew that education was critical to creating the types of workforce they required, too. But the world of work has changed so profoundly since then, and continues to do so at an ever-quickening pace. We know that many of the jobs of previous decades are disappearing and being rapidly replaced by contemporary counterparts. It is almost impossible to predict the direction of advancing technologies, and where they will take us.

How can schools prepare students to navigate this ever-changing economic landscape? They must connect students with their unique talents and interests, dissolve the division between academic and vocational programs, and foster practical partnerships between schools and the world of work, so that young people can experience working environments as part of their education, not simply when it is time for them to enter the labor market.

Education should enable young people to become active and compassionate citizens. We live in densely woven social systems. The benefits we derive from them depend on our working together to sustain them. The empowerment of individuals has to be balanced by practicing the values and responsibilities of collective life, and of democracy in particular. Our freedoms in democratic societies are not automatic. They come from centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy and those who foment sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Those struggles are far from over. As John Dewey observed, “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.”

For a democratic society to function, it depends upon the majority of its people to be active within the democratic process. In many democracies, this is increasingly not the case. Schools should engage students in becoming active, and proactive, democratic participants. An academic civics course will scratch the surface, but to nurture a deeply rooted respect for democracy, it is essential to give young people real-life democratic experiences long before they come of age to vote.

Eight Core Competencies

The conventional curriculum is based on a collection of separate subjects. These are prioritized according to beliefs around the limited understanding of intelligence we discussed in the previous chapter, as well as what is deemed to be important later in life. The idea of “subjects” suggests that each subject, whether mathematics, science, art, or language, stands completely separate from all the other subjects. This is problematic. Mathematics, for example, is not defined only by propositional knowledge; it is a combination of types of knowledge, including concepts, processes, and methods as well as propositional knowledge. This is also true of science, art, and languages, and of all other subjects. It is therefore much more useful to focus on the concept of disciplines rather than subjects.

Disciplines are fluid; they constantly merge and collaborate. In focusing on disciplines rather than subjects we can also explore the concept of interdisciplinary learning. This is a much more holistic approach that mirrors real life more closely—it is rare that activities outside of school are as clearly segregated as conventional curriculums suggest. A journalist writing an article, for example, must be able to call upon skills of conversation, deductive reasoning, literacy, and social sciences. A surgeon must understand the academic concept of the patient’s condition, as well as the practical application of the appropriate procedure. At least, we would certainly hope this is the case should we find ourselves being wheeled into surgery.

The concept of disciplines brings us to a better starting point when planning the curriculum, which is to ask what students should know and be able to do as a result of their education. The four purposes above suggest eight core competencies that, if properly integrated into education, will equip students who leave school to engage in the economic, cultural, social, and personal challenges they will inevitably face in their lives. These competencies are curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship. Rather than be triggered by age, they should be interwoven from the beginning of a student’s educational journey and nurtured throughout.

From Imagine If: Creating a Future for Us All by Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D and Kate Robinson, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2022 by the Estate of Sir Kenneth Robinson and Kate Robinson.

The next decade of education transformation: 5 reports to spur debate and discussion

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development.

September 15, 2022

This year, the Center for Universal Education (CUE) at Brookings is 20 years old. In 2002, Gene Sperling founded the center to help advance the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals and was deeply involved with the establishment and early governance of the Education for All Fast Track Initiative, the predecessor of the Global Partnership for Education. We have traveled far over the last two decades. Much of the center’s work over the first decade was dedicated to this type of strengthening education ecosystems work at the global level. We have been proud to collaborate with many partners—often going from research to recommendations to action (e.g., the Global Business Coalition for Education , the U.N. Special Envoy’s Office for Global Education , the Learning Metrics Task Force , and the Education Commission )—to help elevate education on the global agenda.

Today, as CUE looks toward our third decade of work, we plan to build on our existing efforts to work with partners in education jurisdictions around the world to advance the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Since 2016, we have been partnering with approximately 100 partners in 40 countries around the world from governments to civil society organizations to the private sector to work collaboratively on identifying and scaling evidence-based, contextually relevant and impactful change. Working with our partners, we have worked across an array of important topics from understanding the range of competencies young people need to thrive in a fast changing world to identifying innovations that help leapfrog education to change management processes that help sustainably embed new approaches inside education systems to processes that center women and girls’ voices to advance gender-transformative educational approaches.

Faced with the deep impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, increasing economic inequality, and a wave of fake news the U.N. Secretary General calls an “infodemic,” it is clear that education systems must not only recover from lost instructional time but deeply pivot to live up to their potential to be a transformative social service in communities around the world.

Moving forward, we will bring all our work together under the shared goal of transformation. We will focus our efforts, working even more deeply with our partners, to help advance education system transformation that can get jurisdiction leaders and their partners closer to the vision embedded in the SDGs: equitable and relevant education that helps everyone become a lifelong learner. Faced with the deep impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic alongside the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, increasing economic inequality, and a wave of fake news the U.N. Secretary General calls an “infodemic,” it is clear that education systems must not only recover from lost instructional time but deeply pivot in order to live up to their potential to be a transformative social service in communities around the world.

To kick off our new vision for advancing education system transformation over the next decade, we are sharing five publications focused on transformation. We hope these inspire conversation and debate. They are intended to explore education transformation’s urgency, the hurdles faced, and the various pathways needed for advancement. These pieces can be explored in any order, and we invite you to read them, critique them, and share your thoughts with us.

1. ‘Transforming education systems: What, why, and how’

In this piece , coauthors David Sengeh and I provide a big-picture look at what transformation is, why it is important, and some steps to engage in a transformation journey. We argue that education system transformation should entail “a fresh review of the goals of your education system—are they meeting the moment we are in, tackling inequality and building resilience for a changing world, fully context aware, and owned broadly across society—and then fundamentally positioning all components of your education system to contribute toward this shared purpose.” We go on to propose three main steps that system leaders in particular can take to advance transformation in their community or country (Figure 1): This “participatory approach” to transformation draws on evidence from multiple countries on what are major barriers to and accelerators of education system change.

Figure 1. The participatory approach to transformation

2. ‘Transforming education for holistic student development: Learning from education system (re)building around the world’

This piece was developed through close collaboration with scholars in almost 10 universities around the world. The lead authors, Amanda Datnow, Vicki Park, Donald Peurach, and James Spillane, examine the twin questions: “What would it mean—and what would it take—to build education systems that develop every child as would that child’s own parents? Is there evidence that it is possible to (re)build academically focused education systems to support holistic student development?” They argue that this shift—from academic only to holistic development—is essential if systems are to transform to help young people thrive. To answer this question, they worked with 10 scholars—Juan Bravo, Whitney Hegseth, Jeanne Ho, Devi Khanna, Dennis Kwek, Angela Lyle, Amelia Peterson, Thomas K. Walsh, Jose Weinstein, and Hwei Ming Wong—to examine reform journeys across seven jurisdictions. With a focus on high and middle-income countries, they examined the barriers and strategies seven systems used to expand toward holistic learning, including in districts, states, or national ministries in Chile, Canada, India, Ireland, Singapore, the United States, and in the cross-national International Baccalaureate system.

Ultimately, they identified 10 major lessons coming out of the transformation journeys across the seven systems: 1) Engage diverse stakeholders, 2) Construct coherence, 3) Manage the equity and rigor tension, 4) Build social infrastructure, 5) Develop instructional designs, 6) Design educational infrastructure, 7) Balance common conventions with local discretion, 8) Distribute leadership, 9) Support infrastructure use, and 10) Monitor practice and performance.

3. ‘Systems thinking to transform schools: Identifying levers that lift educational quality’

This piece , coauthored by Bruce Fuller and Hoyun Kim, provides a deep dive into the historical roots of systems thinking and how it has informed approaches to education reform. It primarily draws upon the intellectual traditions and literature in high-income countries but also illustrates how these ideas have traveled to middle- and low-income countries. After reviewing the organizational levers inside education systems that touch classrooms, it outlines the diverse approaches to education reform informed by systems thinking. The authors argue that there are at least four distinct education change approaches inspired by systems thinking: 1) standards-based accountability, 2) instructional sub-system, 3) teaching guild, and 4) ecological approach.

Each pathway reflects a distinct analysis of the core problems holding back system improvement and where the power lies to address the problems. Ultimately, the authors argue that although it is not “either, or” in terms of selecting one pathway over another, there is a need in many parts of the world to thaw out “highly institutionalized habits and routines” in favor of harnessing the capacity to innovate and be responsive to particular community needs by local schools and education ecosystems. They conclude with a set of key questions leaders should ask themselves when reflecting on how to harness systems thinking for improving education.

4. ‘Shared priorities to transform education systems: Mapping recovery and transformation agendas’

In this piece , I argue that the United Nation’s Transforming Education Summit (TES) is a unique opportunity for education to be at the top of the global agenda, and to make the most of this moment, actors in the global education ecosystem will need to coalesce around a shared narrative, finding ways to work synergistically—not competitively—in education jurisdictions around the world. I start by reviewing the past success of the global education community in coming together behind the shared “access plus learning” narrative in the lead-up to the development of the SDGs. I then map the range of agendas generating attention and debate in the TES process, especially at the presummit meeting in Paris this past June. I argue that there is a broad distinction between those actors focusing on pandemic recovery versus those focused on longer-term transformation. But while both approaches are needed—and indeed complementary—there is a need to forge closer linkages across agendas.

The piece highlights six of the main agendas prominently discussed in the TES process to date and analyzes them in relation to the level of support they receive by global actors versus actors representing “voices inside the system”—namely students, parents, teachers, local civil society, and governments. While this analysis only highlights some of the agendas and debates underway, it offers three recommendations in order to catalyze dialogue around where there are clear areas of synergy and where deeper discussion is needed: 1) Work collaboratively on addressing equity and inclusion, which is a broadly shared priority, 2) find ways of working more closely together across complementary agendas focused on building young people’s competence and capability—namely foundational learning, student well-being, and 21st century skills for work and citizenship, and 3) engage in deep discussions on who has the power—global versus voices inside the system actors—to define the purpose of education and guide transformation efforts.

5. Big Education Conversation

Together with a coalition of partners, including Big Change in the United Kingdom alongside multiple government and civil society actors, CUE is launching at TES the global Big Education Conversation . This initiative draws on CUE’s research on mapping the purpose of education across family members, teachers, students, and school leaders as an approach to kickstart conversations about education transformation in communities. One year ago, CUE launched “ Collaborating to transform and improve systems: A playbook for family-school engagement ” and has since been piloting the playbook’s Conversation Starter Tools (surveys and conversation guidance) in over 10 countries across the Americas, Africa, and Asia.

Last year Big Change adapted CUE’s survey questions as part of a national Big Education Conversation in the U.K. about the purpose of education. As described above in the first “P” (Purpose) of the participatory approach to education, there is strong evidence to suggest that developing a shared understanding across society of the goals of the education system can accelerate transformation and failing to do so can block it. Hence, the Big Education Conversation initiative is a scalable tool to catalyzing discussions around the purpose of education and can be used by decisionmakers to advance participatory policymaking and by youth, parent, teacher, or community networks to catalyze demand for opening dialogue around the purpose of education. CUE team members Akilah Allen, Emily Morris, Laura Nora, Sophie Partington, Claire Sukumar, and I are leading this work and invite anyone to take up and use the Big Education Conversation approach in their communities and countries.

Related Content

Bruce Fuller, Hoyun Kim

September 12, 2022

Amanda Datnow, Vicki Park, Donald J. Peurach, James P. Spillane

September 13, 2022

Early Childhood Education Global Education

Global Economy and Development

Center for Universal Education

Brad Olsen, Molly Curtiss Wyss, Maya Elliott

September 16, 2024

Magdalena Rodríguez Romero

September 10, 2024

September 6, 2024

Fact Check Team: Is education in America getting better or worse?

by EMMA WITHROW and JANAE BOWENS | The National Desk

WASHINGTON (TND) — Education was one of the topics most notably left out during last week’s presidential debate, despite being one of the top issue areas of concern for Americans.

The coronavirus pandemic brought some serious challenges to education and students across the nation are still recovering from learning loss.

According to a report from Northwest Evaluation Association, on average, grade school students need at least four extra months of schooling to catch up in math and reading. The gap between pre-COVID and COVID test score averages widened in nearly all grades, by an average of 36% in reading and 18% in math.

Education in America as a whole started changing even before the pandemic, with enrollment in colleges and universities peaking in 2010 and declining ever since. Also, more than 25% of students in K-12 schools are now chronically absent -- meaning they missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year

But as far as test scores go, the National Assessment of Educational Progress reports students were progressively testing better in math and reading since the 1970s -- that is until the pandemic hit with a 5 to 7 point drop in 2022, the largest decline in test scores since 1990.

Former President Donald Trump has said he wants to abolish the Department of Education.

The Department of Education has a budget of $224 billion , which goes toward public school grants, student loans, and Pell grants for low-income students. If the department was abolished, the funding could go with it or would need to be funneled through another agency. Trump says the states need to run the education system.

This discussion is taking place as parents turn to education alternatives.

An analysis from the Pew Research Center found traditional public school enrollment has dropped by around 5% over the last decade. Charter schools are growing in popularity and private schools have held steady accounting for 10% of school enrollment. Also, more parents are homeschooling. The National Home Education Research Institute shows 2.5 million homeschooled students in the spring 2019. It increased to 3.1 million for the 2021-2022 school year.

The tutoring industry is expected to grow at a rate of 6.8% annually from 2019 to 2027. The test preparation and tutoring industries are also on the rise.

• Communities
• Nation / World

UW System no longer readily providing branch campus enrollment data

The University of Wisconsin System is no longer reporting enrollment by campus, making it more difficult for the public to know where their local branch campus stands financially.

Six of the 13 branch campuses have closed or will by the end of this school year, with declining enrollment cited as the primary justification for closure.

"There's enough tension and anxiety over the closure of some UW institutions without (UW System) making matters worse by trying to shield basic enrollment numbers from the public," said Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, an organization that promotes government transparency. "It's only going to increase the amount of distrust people have toward UW universities."

The change in practice came to light when the UW System released preliminary headcounts at each university on Monday. The data showed most universities enrolled more students than they did the previous year, marking the second straight year of enrollment growth despite fewer traditional high school students to recruit and the disastrous rollout of a new federal financial aid form.

But the UW System declined to release campus-level data for universities, seven of which have more than one campus. UW System President Jay Rothman defended the decision, saying that because some students take classes at multiple campuses, it's "hard to try to pinpoint exactly" where the students are. That makes the university's total enrollment the "best number to report."

Rothman rejected the idea of the reporting change providing less transparency. He said chancellors are in "regular communication" with communities that have a branch campus.

6 UW branch campuses have closed

The branch campuses have long operated as more affordable launchpads for students to start a college degree closer to home before transferring to a four-year university. The two-year campuses have struggled to fill seats for more than a decade. In 2018, the UW System placed these campuses under the oversight of four-year universities in a hail Mary attempt to keep them open.

The approach hasn't panned out. UW-Platteville Richland shuttered after the spring 2023 semester. UW-Milwaukee at Washington County ,  UW-Oshkosh Fond du Lac  and  UW-Green Bay Marinette  closed at the end of the 2024 spring semester.  UW-Milwaukee at Waukesha and UW-Oshkosh Fox Cities  will close after the spring 2025 semester.

The reporting change marks a departure from five years of practice. The UW System previously provided reporters with branch campus enrollment data upon request and within a few hours. Obtaining the information now will require a public records request be made under the state's public records law.

Universities collect campus-level data and report it to the UW System but declined to provide this data to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Monday, referring the question to the UW System.

UW universities provided branch campus projections this summer

Universities provided some indication of enrollment at their branch campuses in budget documents released in June . The estimates were based on the number of full-time equivalent students, not a headcount, which counts every student even if they are not enrolled full-time.

The projections showed:

• UW-Milwaukee at Waukesha: 445 students, a decrease of 324 due to the closure of UWM's other branch campus at Washington County
• UW-Eau Claire Barron County: 288 students, an increase of nine
• UW-Green Bay Manitowoc and Sheobygan: Steady with a decrease of two students
• UW-Oshkosh Fox Cities: 802 students, a decrease of 355, of which 332 are due to the closure of UW-Oshkosh's other branch campus in Fond du Lac
• UW-Platteville Baraboo/Sauk County: 152 students, a decrease of 19
• UW-Stevents Point Wausau and Marshifield: 309 students, a decrease of 57
• UW-Whitewater Rock County: 550 students, an increase of 17

Which universities gained students? Which lost?

Eight of the 13 universities reported a higher headcount than the previous fall.

UW-Madison unsurprisingly led the way in growth, gaining nearly 1,400 students for an enrollment of more than 51,700.

UW-Whitewater also reported a more than 2% increase, pushing its enrollment to nearly 11,800 students.

UW-Oshkosh and UW-Platteville took the largest hits, with each losing more than 4% of students compared to last fall.

UW-Milwaukee reported a less than 1% decline. UW-Parkside and UW-Stout also reported declines.

"This is significant because it represents a second straight year of enrollment growth, despite significant headwinds," Rothman said. "And it demonstrates that families and students continue to value the education our universities provide."

Rollout of new FAFSA form hurt UW enrollment

Among the headwinds universities are facing: fewer traditional high school students to recruit, and fewer of them choosing to go on to college. These demographic problems have plagued institutions across the country for much of the past decade.

A less-familiar obstacle for UW campuses this year was the federal government's revamp of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, also known as FAFSA. The rollout of the new form was marred by technical glitches, delays and bureaucratic problems that likely dissuaded some who were on the fence to not bother with college.

Rothman said universities didn't see the typical late surge of enrollments they would have in normal years, which he attributed to the form's problems and uncertainty over financial aid awards.

Another factor that hurt enrollment, Rothman said, was the closure of three branch campuses and the lack of a program promising tuition coverage for low-income, in-state students available to students this fall outside of UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee .

Rothman is asking the state Legislature to fund a statewide promise program in the future.

Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at [email protected] or 414-223-5168. Follow her on X (Twitter) at @KellyMeyerhofer.

• Today's news
• Reviews and deals
• Climate change
• 2024 election
• Newsletters
• Fall allergies
• Health news
• Mental health
• Sexual health
• Family health
• So mini ways
• Unapologetically
• Buying guides

Entertainment

• How to Watch
• My watchlist
• Stock market
• Biden economy
• Personal finance
• Stocks: most active
• Stocks: gainers
• Stocks: losers
• Trending tickers
• World indices
• US Treasury bonds
• Top mutual funds
• Highest open interest
• Highest implied volatility
• Currency converter
• Basic materials
• Communication services
• Consumer cyclical
• Consumer defensive
• Financial services
• Industrials
• Real estate
• Mutual funds
• Credit cards
• Balance transfer cards
• Cash back cards
• Rewards cards
• Travel cards
• Online checking
• High-yield savings
• Money market
• Home equity loan
• Personal loans
• Student loans
• Options pit
• Fantasy football
• Pro Pick 'Em
• College Pick 'Em
• Fantasy baseball
• Fantasy hockey
• Fantasy basketball
• Download the app
• Daily fantasy
• Scores and schedules
• GameChannel
• World Baseball Classic
• Premier League
• CONCACAF League
• Champions League
• Motorsports
• Horse racing

New on Yahoo

• Privacy Dashboard

Florida's schools could get even more partisan after November

TALLAHASSEE, Florida — Floridians will vote on a ballot measure this November that would add party labels to local school board races for the first time in decades, potentially supercharging what have already become contentious contests across the state.

These offices have been under increasing scrutiny since the pandemic, when the lessons and content taught to students became a front and center issue that grabbed the attention of parents and policymakers. Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies view winning control of school boards as key to reshaping the state’s education system, something GOP leaders have been chipping away at over the last few years. And it isn’t just in Florida — there have been increasingly fierce fights over school board seats across the country, from swing counties in Pennsylvania to Republicans trying to gain a toehold in blue California .

DeSantis waded into 30 school board contests in 2022 with endorsements and fundraising help — a near unprecedented level of involvement for a governor in these local elections — and won nearly all of them . This year, facing more organized opposition from Democrats and the state’s largest teacher unions, DeSantis had a mixed record in school board contests in August — with a handful of races still to be decided in November.

Now, voters will have a chance to decide whether they want to officially scrub the nonpartisan veneer off these contests that have already seen significant involvement from the parties, possibly reversing a choice from 1998 to strip away party labels for local school leaders.

The Florida Republican Party, GOP lawmakers and some school board candidates support the idea, believing that the proposed change to Florida’s constitution will give voters more clarity about who is running for office in their communities.

“This is not something that is an insane idea,” said state Rep. Spencer Roach, the North Fort Myers Republican who sponsored the legislation in the House. “Why should you be able to use the cover of the law to hide your ideology or platform from voters?”

Those who oppose the measure, however, contend that fully embracing partisanship in these races will siphon attention away from setting sound education policy for kids, in lieu of politics charged by culture war battles.

“I don’t think our children should be politicized or that our teachers and children should be caught in the middle of social issues,” said Cindy Pearson, a Duval School Board member and registered Republican who won a reelection bid in August against a candidate endorsed by DeSantis.

The upcoming November referendum, slotted as Amendment 1 on the ballot, comes after the latest round of school board elections influenced by partisan fighting and riffing on school choice and culture war issues such as the state’s contentious “book bans.”

These races, which featured dueling endorsements from DeSantis and Florida Democrats and teachers unions, could prove to be the last officially nonpartisan campaigns in Florida. Out of 23 candidates endorsed by DeSantis this year, six won their races, with another six heading to November runoffs. DeSantis officials heralded the election cycle as a win for flipping Duval County’s school board to lean conservative, yet candidates backed by the governor also lost races in deep red areas like Sarasota and Indian River counties.

DeSantis supports adding partisan labels to school board races, with a spokesperson pointing to comments he made in 2023.

"What we've seen over the years is you have counties in Southwest Florida that voted for me by like 40 points. And yet they're electing people, the school board, who are totally the opposite philosophy,” DeSantis said in January 2023. “But those people are running saying that they're sharing the philosophy, then they get on and they do something different."

If the amendment passes, school board candidates starting in 2026 would be nominated in partisan primaries ahead of the general election.

Long debated by lawmakers at the statehouse, it was added to the ballot against the wishes of the majority of legislative Democrats who voted against the idea.

But the proposed school board amendment is flying under the radar this year, with Floridians contemplating major constitutional amendments surrounding abortion rights and legalizing recreational marijuana. Unlike those two amendments, which have seen tens of millions of spending, there has been comparatively little outreach or ad spending from supporters or opponents.

One August poll conducted by Suffolk University reported that 48 percent of voters were against the amendment compared to 33 percent who supported it. A July poll from the University of North Florida found that a significant number of voters have not made up their minds on the issue: Forty percent said they would vote no and 37 percent said they supported it, with the remainder undecided.

Amendments need 60 percent to pass.

School board races are nonpartisan in the vast majority of states, with only four — Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Connecticut — listing partying affiliation on the ballot for all school board contests, according to Ballotpedia . More than 90 percent of school board members across the country are picked by voters without any party labels.

Opponents of the amendment worry it will lead to more political influence in these races and could choke out grassroots efforts by local candidates running for office. The state Democratic Party also opposes the measure, with the party's executive committee voting this weekend to urge Floridians to vote no, as the party slips further behind the GOP in voter registrations in the one-time swing state.

“Partisan politics should not be in our school districts,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried told reporters in August. “We should all be focused on one thing and one thing only: teaching our children.”

But supporters contend there is a need for transparency with conservatives and liberals fighting for different ideologies in public education.

“I’ve seen the scenario where someone will go to an area they know is leaning one direction and present themselves in that way,” said Layla Collins, a DeSantis-endorsed candidate who ran for Hillsborough’s school board. “The next day, what they say in another area has someone convinced the opposite is true.”

Byju’s Legal and Financial Woes: What It Means for India’s Education System

The ed-tech sector users which cuts across K-12, test preparation and skill development segment is estimated to go up to 120mn by 2030

In a recent turn of events in Byju’s never-ending saga, the US lenders recently disputed Byju Raveendran’s claim last week on the company's verified debt to them being merely Rs 20 crore as per the insolvency proceedings.

Glas Trust, which represents the US consortium of lenders, have stated that the embattled ed-tech firm would have to cough up the entire $1.2bn Term B Loan with interest.  

The financial trouble of the once most-valued Indian ed-tech start-up began after US-based lenders filed a lawsuit against the ed-tech firm to recover $1.2bn Term Loan B in June 2023.

Byju’s secured Term Loan B in November 2021 to propel its global expansion and growth strategy. For the uninitiated, Term Loan Bs are acquired by companies to get large amounts of capital with more flexible terms and maturities.

Advertisement

Notwithstanding that, in August, following a plea filed by Glas Trust, the Supreme Court had stayed the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal's (NCLAT) approval of the settlement between Byju’s and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) over sponsorship dues amounting to Rs 158 crore.

NCLAT’s approval quashed the insolvency proceedings that was initiated against it by the BCCI.

The Supreme Court will reportedly hear the plea on September 17.

With Byju's in a state of turmoil, what does the future hold for the ed-tech firms in the country?

Byju’s, Ed-tech and India’s Education System

India's education system is highly flawed. The government-run schools and colleges, which serve a large portion of the population, suffer from inadequate infrastructure.

India’s public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP has been around 3 per cent for several years, which is lower compared to many other countries with robust education systems. According to the Ministry of Education’s report in 2022, over 60 per cent of government schools still face teacher shortages, impacting the quality of education and student-teacher ratios.

Additionally, the outdated syllabus and curriculum fail to equip students with the skills required to meet the demands of the modern world. Moreover, there's also a significant shortage of adequately qualified teachers. 

Ed-tech platforms like Byju's, Unacademy etc. initially aimed to address these challenges and, to a large extent, found success in doing so. They democratised the education system by offering flagship courses that could only have been afforded by the well-to-do in the Indian society. Right from K-12 Segment to UPSC preparation, all these ed-tech platforms were able to offer courses at a very convenient rate and means to the general masses.

India is reportedly home to around 400 ed-tech start-ups including the likes of Byju’s, Upgrad, Eruditis, Vedantu and Physics Wallah. Their big break came when Covid-19 made the world come to a standstill with many schools, colleges and educational institutions getting closed. During the pandemic, with every sphere of life becoming online, there was an increased proliferation of internet connection along with mobile phones and laptops. Students resorted to the online mode of education and adapted to it quickly.

The number of users on these platforms substantially increased over the course of the pandemic years. For example, Byju’s users reportedly increased from 20mn to 40mn within a span of four months. The growth trajectory that happened during the pandemic for Byju’s would have taken years to achieve for any ed-tech firm. Platforms like Toppr and Unacademy were able to achieve similar feats.

But things started to go haywire for many of the ed-tech firms as the pandemic receded and demand for online education came down with many preferring offline classes.

Like many ed-tech firms, Byju’s revenue began to falter with the consolidated revenues jumping to Rs 8,245 crore in FY22, almost double the amount from Rs 4,564 crore in FY21.

A similar trend was also observed with Unacademy as it experienced notable financial challenges. In FY23, Unacademy reported a loss of approximately Rs 2,800 crore. Toppr reported a loss of approximately Rs 458 crore.

Byju's struggled to pay off the loans that it had gathered from the US-based lenders. It also reportedly led to over 10,000 being laid off over the past two years. The company faced severe cash crunch, pay cuts and defaults on investor’s payments leading the firm to a precarious situation.

What’s Next for Ed-tech in the Country?

As per Blume Ventures, India is the second largest market for e-learning after the US and is expected to grow to $10.5mn by 2025.

It is believed that investors would be very sceptical when it comes to investing in the ed-tech firm after the whole Byju's conundrum. However, experts believe contrary to the prevailing claims.

Anil Nagar, co-founder and CEO of Adda247, a local language learning platform backed by Google and Westbridge Capital told Outlook Business earlier, "Some business models were flawed and received funding, leading everyone to believe these were the right models."

Despite Byju’s faltering, Nagar feels that the online mode of education is here to stay and some companies would emerge as major online education providers in India.

Nagar believes that things will get better and normalised as education is a big market in India and a big problem to solve.

While there is uncertainty about the revival of the ed-tech sector, there have been venture capitalists who have shown interest in the sector.

One of the emerging ed-tech firms in the country, PhysicsWallah, in August, was set to raise $150mn taking the company’s valuation to $2.8bn.

As per KPMG, the ed-tech sector, with roughly 18.55mn paid users across K-12, test preparation and skill development, is estimated to go up to 120mn by 2030.

• Edtech Major Byju's

MOST POPULAR

Watch | ANI Vs Wiki: Rs 2 crore defamation case

Watch | RBI Plans To Launch Lending Platform ULI

Watch | Adani After Hindenburg 2.0

Should India Host Olympics?

University of South Florida

Department of Mathematics & Statistics

College of Arts and Sciences

Main Navigation

Assistant professor of statistics & data science.

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of South Florida seeks to fill a 9-month, full-time, tenure-track Assistant Professor in Statistics/Data Science position on our Tampa campus starting August 7, 2025. To receive consideration, applications must be submitted no later than November 15, 2024. Salary is negotiable.

Minimum qualifications include a doctoral degree from an accredited institution in Statistics (or Mathematics with a concentration in Statistics), with a demonstrated record of achievement in teaching, academic research, and service. Doctoral degree must be conferred by August 1, 2025. Must meet university criteria for appointment to the rank of Assistant Professor. Preference will be given to candidates who have strong theoretical foundation in Statistics and/or Data Sciences, evidenced by a strong record of research with publications in statistical or related journals. Interdisciplinary collaborative experience is a plus.

Applicants must demonstrate evidence of, or potential for, excellence both in research and teaching; previous teaching experience is preferred. The candidate hired to this position will be expected to teach effectively at both undergraduate and graduate levels in Statistics, to maintain a vigorous research program, to seek external research funding, and to develop a satisfactory record of service.

Applications must be submitted to http://employment.usf.edu (Job ID 37809). Required documentation, submitted as a SINGLE document, includes a Cover Letter, CV, a Statement of Teaching Philosophy, a Statement of Research, and evidence of successful research and teaching. In addition, candidates should have at least three letters of recommendation submitted through MathJobs.org .

Conclusion of this search is subject to final budget approval. According to Florida law, applications and meetings regarding them are open to the public. For disability accommodations, contact Denise L. Marks (813-974-9747/[email protected]), a minimum of five working days in advance.

• Election 2024
• Entertainment
• Newsletters
• Photography
• AP Investigations
• AP Buyline Personal Finance
• AP Buyline Shopping
• Press Releases
• Israel-Hamas War
• Russia-Ukraine War
• Global elections
• Asia Pacific
• Latin America
• Middle East
• Election results
• Google trends
• AP & Elections
• College football
• Auto Racing
• Movie reviews
• Book reviews
• Financial Markets
• Business Highlights
• Financial wellness
• Artificial Intelligence
• Social Media

Disney trips meant for homeless students went to NYC school employees’ kids, officials say

• Copy Link copied

NEW YORK (AP) — Six employees of New York City’s public school system took their children or grandchildren on trips to Disney World, New Orleans and other locations using tickets that were meant for homeless students, investigators said in a newly released report.

The trips intended as enrichment for students living in shelters and other temporary housing also included excursions to Washington, D.C., Boston and Broadway shows, said Anastasia Coleman, the special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools.

According to the report released this month, Linda Wilson, the Queens regional manager for the office that supports students in temporary housing, took her own children on trips that were paid for through grants for homeless students and encouraged employees she supervised to do the same but to keep quiet about it.

“What happens here stays with us,” one staffer quoted Wilson as saying.

Contacted by the New York Post , Wilson denied bringing her two daughters on trips or encouraging staff members to bring their children. Wilson called the special commissioner’s probe “a witch hunt.”

The investigation began after a whistleblower brought a complaint in March 2019. The special commissioner’s report, which concerned trips that took place between 2016 and 2019, was completed in January 2023 but only made public on Sept. 9.

The special commissioner’s office said in an emailed statement that the report was not released because of the pending administrative actions.

According to the report, Wilson forged permission slips to bring family members on trips and evaded city Department of Education oversight by using an outside agency to book travel arrangements.

Some of the trips were intended as college tours, but the students and chaperones never actually visited the campuses, witnesses told the investigators.

A group including Wilson and one of her daughters as well as other staff members and their children ate lunch at Syracuse University during a June 2018 trip but never toured the school, witnesses said. They left and went to Niagara Falls instead, according to the investigation.

The special commissioner’s office recommended that Wilson and the other staff members faulted in the report be fired and that they be required to reimburse the school system for their family members’ trips.

Wilson told the Post that she retired and was not fired.

Department of Education spokesperson Jenna Lyle said in a statement, “All staff identified in this report are no longer employed by New York City Public Schools.”