Our education system fails most students, argues Oren Cass, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and author of How the Other Half Learns.  Looking at students entering ninth grade, only 16 percent “manage to smoothly travel the high school-to-college-to-career pipeline that we take to be the system’s goal.” High school graduation rates have increased, but there’s “troubling evidence that those increases are driven by declining standards, data manipulation, and outright fraud,”

“Students who take a lot of career-and-technical-education classes in high school are hard workers who are less likely than their peers to skip class,” according to an American Enterprise Institute study, reports Ed Week’s Catherine Gewertz. Career tech-ed students tend to score lower on reading and math tests, but have stronger “noncognitive” or “soft” skills, the study found. Graduation rates are higher for CTE concentrators. They tend to earn more in their mid-20s than cla

Pushed to offer more college-prep classes, California high schools have cut auto shop and other vocational classes, reports Carolyn Jones on EdSource. Now teachers argue that shop classes provide a hands-on way to teach science, technology engineering and math, or STEM. Students learn auto repair in Hayward, California. Photo: Carolyn Jones/EdSource “Auto shop these days is . . . about engineering, math, computers, physics, problem solving,” said Ruben Parra, president of the

The future of college may not include going to class or earning a degree, writes AP’s Maria Danilova. “Education startups are offering alternatives — from boot camps, to one- or two-year tracks, to accredited degree programs — and their founders say these options will give students a more relevant education in today’s job market, and at a lower price.” MissionU, which began accepting its first applications last month, offers a one-year nondegree program in data analytics and