Although most of the big-media analyses will inevitably dwell upon the race and gender gaps between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on Super Tuesday, exit poll results underscore a class divide among Democratic and independent voters, which could be the only demographic gap that really matters when Obama or Clinton...

Harvard's decision to drastically reduce tuition costs for "middle" income families has some observers gushing with praise for America's richest and most powerful university.

But it's not completely out of altruism that Harvard has slashed costs to families earning as much as $180,000 a year -- a "middle" income...

When Nobel-prize winning geneticist James Watson was quoted in the British press the other day saying that he held out little hope for the future of Africa owing to the inferior intelligence of Africans, he became just one more in a long line of prominent Americans who got caught in...

"Student achievement is on the rise," said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said last week in response to new data showing better math and reading scores for American schoolchildren.

"No Child Left Behind is working," she went on. "It's doable, reasonable and necessary. Any efforts to weaken accountability would fly...

I received an interesting invitation the other day. It was from Marshal Zeringue. Marshal runs a wonderful website called the Campaign for the American Reader, and he has a blog that he calls the Page 99 Test, which is based on this Ford Madox Ford quote: "Open the book...

So this is what it's come to. In the 1950's blacks in the South sued schools because white segregationists were excluding black children from attending their pseudo-private public schools. Now, in 2007, white families sue schools for including blacks and other minorities, for trying to prevent the re-segregation of American...

You have to know just two things to understand what kind of country America has become in the last generation. First, you need to know how much we're spending on prisons; second, you need to know how much the country is spending on public higher education. Know those things for...

Ashlea Jackson grew up in a trailer park, and she grew up poor. Neither of her parents attended college, working at whatever jobs they could find to make ends meet. Her two brothers were always in trouble with the law, and one day in middle school when she saw her...

Imagine you're an admissions officer at an elite college or university, which admits just one out of every 10 students who apply. In your job, the university's prestige and reputation are always on the line in every admissions decision you make. You operate within a framework of relatively narrow parameters....

Stay the course. Don't give in to the naysayers and defeatists. Forge ahead with the same failed paradigms for improving schools, creating democracies, closing achievement gaps and winning the war against terrorism.

Indeed, the parallels between the Iraq War and George Bush's education centerpiece, No Child Left Behind, became even...

I have a friend who has two young children and four dogs. One of these dogs is a pit bull. Captain Chuck, as my friend is known, is quiet and gentle, well educated, and upper-middle class. He's hardly the sort you would think would own a pit pull. I...

First, some cultural accounting: A Google search on the Ivy League yields about 3.9 million hits, an average of more than 487,000 for each of the eight Ivy League universities. By contrast, a search on community colleges produces 21 million hits, or an average of 21,190 for each...

The recent disclosure by a college president that U.S. News & World Report is willing to publish made-up data about a college that dares not play the silly rankings game suggests just how far the magazine is willing to act like Tony Soprano to protect its lucrative franchise. And I'm...

When it comes to the class divide in America, we can pretend that it doesn't exist. We can pretend that we can become whoever we'd like to be in life, regardless of the family we were were born to, what neighborhoods we grew up in, and what sort of...