Anya Kamenetz

Anya Kamenetz is NPR's lead education blogger.  She joined NPR in 2014, working as part of a new initiative to coordinate on-air and online coverage of learning. 

Kamenetz is the author of several books about the future of education.  Generation Debt (Riverhead, 2006), dealt with youth economics and politics; DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (Chelsea Green, 2010), investigated innovations to address the crises in cost, access, and quality in higher education.  Her forthcoming book, The Test (PublicAffairs, 2015), is about the past, present and future of testing in American schools. 

Learning, Freedom and the Web (http://learningfreedomandtheweb.org/), TheEdupunks'Guide (edupunksguide.org), and the Edupunks' Atlas (atlas.edupunksguide.org) are her free web projects about self-directed, web-enabled learning. 

Previously, Kamenetz covered technology, innovation, sustainability and social entrepreneurship for five years as a staff writer for Fast Company magazine.  She's contributed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Magazine, Slate, and O, the Oprah Magazine. 

Kamenetz was named a 2010 Game Changer in Education by the HuffingtonPost, received 2009 and 2010 National Awards for Education Reporting from the Education Writers Association, and was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing by the Village Voice in 2005, where she had a column called Generation Debt. 

She appears in the documentaries Generation Next (2006), Default: A StudentLoan Documentary (2011), both shown on PBS, and Ivory Tower, which premiered at Sundance in 2014 and will be shown on CNN. 

Kamenetz grew up in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, in a family of writers and mystics, and graduated from Yale University in 2002.  She lives in New York City. 

Both houses of Congress have now passed versions of the bill that would update the largest federal education law, known as No Child Left Behind, for the first time since 2001.  They are big, meaty and complicated, and now they have to be reconciled into one messy Dagwood sandwich of a bill to go to the president. 

I've had this phrase running through my head since we started updating our Commencement Speeches database a few weeks ago: "If you're too big for a small job, you're too small for a big job." 

Who said that?  It was Katie Couric at American University last year. 

Who knew that a commencement address could get stuck in your head?  Well, the best of these speeches have a lot in common with a great pop song.  They are simple, emotional, and pack a universal message into just a few words. 

On a rainy Saturday morning in June, 17-year-old Sarah Choudhury showed up bright and early at her SAT testing center in the town of Lagrangeville in upstate New York.  This was her last chance to raise her score before applying for early admission to highly competitive premed programs in the fall. 

As she was taking the test, she says, "chaos" struck.  There was a discrepancy between the time allotted in the student test booklet for one of the sections, 25 minutes, and the proctor's instructions, just 20 minutes. 

In his State of the Union address in January, President Obama had some sure-fire applause lines: "More of our kids are graduating than ever before" and "Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high." 

Which raised some interesting questions: "Is that really true?"  and "Why?"  and "How do we know?"  and "So what?" 

A seed was planted that grew into our project this week examining that number.  Our reporting shows many of the individual stories behind a single statistic: 81 percent, the current U.S. graduation rate. 

Barring a last-minute legal decision, as of July 1, the nation's for-profit colleges are going to be subject to a new Education Department rule known as gainful employment.  That is: Do students end up earning enough to pay off their loans? 

In a windowless classroom, in a tough New Orleans neighborhood, a middle-aged man with piercing eyes is teaching math at top volume. 

"I got a SINGLE DOLLAR if someone can tell me what's the RULE to this problem!"  he intones. 

Today's lesson is about the order of operations, a topic usually taught in elementary school.  On average, Rodney Carey's students are working at a fifth-grade level.  But they are much older, aged 16 to 24. 

Mr. Rodney, as he is known, does whatever he can to motivate them, whether that's ordering in Chinese food or giving out cash prizes. 

It sees you when you're sleeping ... it knows when you're awake ... it knows if you've been hitting the books, so be good for goodness' sake! 

No, it's not Santa Claus.  It's the digital Jiminy Cricket each of us carries in our pocket, otherwise known as a smartphone. 

In a small experiment, researchers at Dartmouth College have shown that data automatically collected by an Android app can guess how students are spending their time — predicting their end-of-term grades with scary accuracy. 

Our story last week about the connection between ADHD, movement and thinking struck a nerve with readers.  We reported on a small study in which students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder performed better on memory tasks when they were allowed to spin and move around in a swiveling chair. 

If you've followed education in the news or at the book store in the past couple of years, chances are you've heard of "grit."  It's often defined as the ability to persevere when times get tough, or to delay gratification in pursuit of a goal. 

Researchers, grant-makers and policymakers have long relied on enrollment numbers for the federally subsidized Free and Reduced-Price Lunch program.  They use those numbers as a handy proxy for measuring how many students are struggling economically.  The paperwork that families submit to show their income becomes the basis of billions in federal funds. 

To be eligible for these programs, a family must earn no more than 85 percent above the poverty line.  Just over half of public school students fit that description. 

It's the sound of hundreds of thousands of public school students in Florida breathing sighs of relief. 

The state's largest school district, Miami-Dade County, just cut the number of district-created, end-of-course exams it will require from roughly 300 to 10.  And even those 10 will be field-tested only, on just a sampling of students. 

Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school nor working.  There are an estimated 5 1/2 million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States. 

The long-running story of the for-profit Corinthian Colleges has entered what looks like a final phase.  As our colleagues at SCPR wrote:

"Corinthian Colleges will shut down all of its remaining 28 ground campuses, displacing about 16,000 students, less than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Education announced it was fining the for-profit institution $30 million for misrepresentation." 

In 2000, a famous experiment showed that when people were presented with a supermarket sampler of 24 exotic fruit flavors, they were more attracted to the display.  But, when the sample included only six flavors, they were 10 times more likely to actually buy. 

Across New York state this week, some students are refusing to take a test, and they're not getting punished for it.  The test is a Common Core-aligned, federally mandated exam, and students, parents and educators are part of what they're calling the opt-out movement. 

Opt-outs made news last week in several states: Colorado, Florida, Oregon, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, to name a few.  The objections are similar everywhere.  But no state is posting numbers like New York. 

On weekend afternoons, Craig Adams Jr. plays for tourists on the streets of the French Quarter. 

He gigs with different bands, bringing whatever's needed: trumpet, trombone, saxophone — he plays six or seven instruments in all.  There's a white plastic bucket on the sidewalk so people can drop in cash as they browse the T-shirts and Mardi Gras masks. 

Craig is 18, and there's music in his blood: "I had my uncle, my grandfather, and my dad to teach me."  His father, Craig Adams Sr.,  leads a group called the Higher Dimensions of Praise Gospel Band. 

Just a few years ago, the Massive Open Online Course was expected to reinvent higher education.  Millions of people were signing up to watch Web-based, video lectures from the world's great universities.  Some were completing real assignments, earning certificates and forming virtual study groups — all for free. 

Latonya Suggs says she borrowed thousands of dollars in student loans to attend the for-profit Corinthian Colleges but has nothing to show for it.  Most employers don't recognize her criminal justice degree. 

"I am completely lost and in debt," Suggs says.  And now she's doing something about it: She's refusing to pay back those loans. 

Suggs and 106 other borrowers now saddled with Corinthian loan debt say their refusal to repay the loans is a form of political protest.  And Tuesday, the U.S. government gave them an audience.