Higher Education News

"You do the best you can with what you know at the time," he says of that grim spring day. "And we did the best we could with what we knew."

Your student loan grace period is a set amount of time after you graduate, leave school, or drop below half-time enrollment before you must begin repayment on your loan. For most student loans, the grace period is six months but in some instances, a grace period could be longer. The grace period gives you time to get financially settled and to select your repayment plan.*

Here are four things you can do during your grace period to prepare for repayment:

1. Get Organized

Start by tracking down all of your student loans. There is a website that allows you to view all your federal student loans in one place.

You can log into www.nslds.ed.gov using your Federal Student Aid PIN to view your loan balances, information about your loan servicer(s), and more.

Note: Don’t forget to check to see if you have private student loans.

2. Contact Your Loan Servicer

A loan servicer is a company that handles the billing and other services on your federal student loan. Your loan servicer can help you choose a repayment plan, understand loan consolidation, and complete other tasks related to your federal student loan, so it is important to maintain contact with your loan servicer. If your circumstances change at any time during your repayment period, your loan servicer will be able to help.

To find out who your loan servicer is, visit nslds.ed.gov. You may have more than one loan servicer, so it is important that you look at each loan individually.

3. Estimate Your Monthly Payments Under Different Repayment Plans

Federal Student Aid recently launched a Repayment Estimator that lets you compare your monthly student loan payment under different repayment plans to help you figure out which repayment plan is right for you.

Just go to www.StudentLoans.gov –> Log in –> Click “Repayment Estimator” in bottom left corner. It will pull in all of your federal student loan information automatically so you can compare repayment plans based on your specific situation.

4. Select The Repayment Plan That Works For You

Although you may select or be assigned a repayment plan when you first begin repaying your student loan, you can change repayment plans at any time. Flexible repayment options are one of the greatest benefits of federal student loans. There are options to tie your monthly payments to your income and even ways you can have your loans forgiven if you are a teacher or employed in certain public service jobs. Once you have determined which repayment plan is right for you, you must contact your loan servicer to officially select a new repayment plan.

* Not all federal student loans have a grace period. Note that for many loans, interest will accrue during your grace period.

Nicole Callahan is a new media analyst at the Department of Education’s office of Federal Student Aid.

A second review team at the Higher Learning Commission says some previously flagged issues remain. It suggests putting the institution on "notice" status.

Steven Hicks, a senior policy advisory for early learning visited DC Prep’s Benning Elementary Campus faculty and students, as part of “ED Goes Back to School Day.”

As part of our celebration of Teacher Appreciation Week (May 6-10), more than 65 ED officials from across the country went “Back to School,” shadowing teachers and experiencing firsthand the challenges and rewards of a day in the classroom. Our team had a unique opportunity to hear about ways the Department can provide greater support for teachers’ work and better understand the demands placed upon them.

Each ED official was assigned to shadow one teacher at various institutions in 13 states and the District of Columbia including; early childhood, K-12, special education, adult learning and English learning programs. Following the regular teaching day, officials and teachers met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senior officials to discuss their experiences and share lessons learned. ED officials benefit greatly from this experience and it helps to inform their work throughout the Department.

Our team had high praise for the teachers they shadowed. Senior Advisor Jo Anderson, visiting second-grade teacher Nicole Lebedeff at Watkins Elementary School in Washington, D.C. compared her teaching style to that of a “symphony conductor” and called the way she managed her classroom a “work of art.” Special Assistant on Early Learning Steven Hicks was impressed with the social and emotional development of the young students at DC Prep, a charter school network with campuses in Northeast Washington D.C., and Teacher Liaison Laurie Calvert was surprised at the advanced level of the curriculum being taught in Riverside Elementary School classes in Alexandria, Va.

Veteran English teacher Linda Golston makes writing lessons engaging for sophomores by harnessing students’ individual passions and 21st century technology at the New Tech Innovative Institute of Gary Community Schools Corporation. Photo courtesy of Anthony KaDarrell Thigpen

Outside of the D.C. area, Diana Huffman from ED’s Office of Communications and Outreach (OCO) in Denver, visited preschool teacher Cindy Maul at Red Hawk Elementary School in Erie, Colo., and said, “I wish every child in America had the opportunity to be with this woman.  Her interaction with the kids was so in tune with them.”

Julie Ewart of ED’s communications office in Chicago, praised the way veteran English teacher Linda Golston harnesses students’ individual passions to make writing lessons engaging at the New Tech Innovative Institute of Gary public schools in northwest Indiana. “I was not a good student last year, but now I’m an honors student,” said sophomore Charles Jones, who credits his improvement to Golston’s classwork that “relates to the real world.”

At the end-of-day wrap up discussion, Secretary Duncan asked the teachers what they would like him to know about what is working and what’s not. The teachers offered honest feedback, including:

• One teacher thanked him for the recently released blueprint for the RESPECT plan (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) – the result of an unprecedented national dialogue for reforming and elevating the teaching profession.  She said that it accurately reflected the concerns and needs of teachers. The RESPECT blueprint calls for teacher salaries to be competitive with professions like architecture, medicine and law; more support for novice teachers; and more career opportunities for veteran teachers.

• Several other teachers expressed support for President Obama’s commitment to investing in early learning because a lot of students are coming into kindergarten behind the mark. Building on the state investments in preschool programs, the President is proposing $75 billion over 10 years to create new partnerships with states to provide high-quality preschool for all 4-year olds.

• Teachers from all grade levels also expressed concerns about the frequency and content of testing, state implementation of the new college and career ready standards, parental engagement and how to help parents become more involved in their children’s education.

• One high school teacher said that we must help students and parents understand that education is the most important tool for social mobility and success in college and career in a global society.

As we wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week 2013, we should make a commitment to remember all year long that our teachers need and deserve our support in transforming America’s schools.

Read Secretary Duncan’s.“More Substantive and Lasting than a Bagel Breakfast,” on the need to support teachers year round.

 Elaine Quesinberry is a Public Affairs Specialist and Media Relations at the U.S. Department of Education.

Officials interviewed by the Government Accountability Office often mentioned the time and cost of gathering consumer-disclosure data as problems.

An information gap is among the factors that make it difficult for students to pay for their higher education, says America's Promise Alliance.

James G. Stavridis, who will retire from the Navy this summer, will become dean of the international-affairs school. Read about that and other job-related news.

Patrick Haden, of the University of Southern California, performed in a musical to model the value of experiencing college more broadly.

The Yale professor of classics and history, who is about to retire, has long advocated fiercely for the study of Western civilization.

Kevin Kumashiro, who has written on oppression in the classroom, will bring his approach to training teachers to the University of San Francisco.

The classic arrangement of buildings around a green may have its roots in an architect's plans for a New York college.

A career center at Hamilton College teaches job-search skills to underprivileged freshmen.

Discussions about socioeconomic class, once taboo, are taking hold on some campuses.

On most of those campuses, the value of living in the house isn't calculated as part of total compensation, because it doesn't have to be.

Median total compensation was more than $440,000 a year, better than a 4-percent increase.

Graham Spanier made as much money as he did in 2011-12 because Penn State, amid a scandal, chose to fire him "without cause."

Glimpses of life in academe from around the world. 

Cross-posted from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Blog.

“I’m calling for investments in educational technology that will help create… educational software that’s as compelling as the best video game. I want you guys to be stuck on a video game that’s teaching you something other than just blowing something up.” - President Obama, March 2011 

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the final winners of this year’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract awards—funds that are reserved for entrepreneurial small businesses using cutting-edge R&D to develop commercially viable technologies to solve tough problems.  And there’s something that may surprise you about the winning contracts: More than half—or 12 in all—are for games and game-related projects, more than in any previous year. That says a lot about the increasingly creative field of educational games, and the growing base of evidence indicating that games can be an important and effective component of our strategy to prepare a highly skilled 21st century American workforce.

The SBIR program at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s research division, provides up to $1.05 million to small businesses for the R&D of commercially viable education technology products. The program holds an annual competition and awards funds in several phases: Phase I awards, up to $150,000 for 6 months, allow for the development of a prototype and research to demonstrate its functionality and feasibility; and Phase II awards, up to $900,000 for 2 years, are for full-scale development of the product, iterative research to refine it, and a pilot study to demonstrate its usability, feasibility, and promise. A small number of Fast Track awards are made each year for funds to cover work in both Phase I and Phase II.

This year’s prominent success of games-related proposals reflects three factors. First, the IES SBIR program has gained a reputation for recognizing and supporting—and so increasingly, attracting—bold innovators such as Filament Games (winner of the National STEM Video Game Challenge in 2011), Sokikom (winner of several industry awards and recent recipient of $1M in angel funding), and Triad Interactive Media (winner of a 2013 SIIA CODiE award). Second, educators are increasingly learning to use games to motivate students in new ways, creating increased demand for new ideas and products in this sector. Third, the recent meteoric rise in popularity of mobile devices has enabled game-playing anywhere and at any time, providing an expanded market of players interested in purchasing education titles.

This year’s SBIR games winners share several themes:

• Most include an adaptive component that auto-adjusts the game difficulty to the competency level of the player.
• Several use story-based narratives to engage students.
•  Most include rewards and competition to drive game play.
• Most include a teaching component that supports the implementation of the game as a supplement to or replacement for standard instructional practice.
• Several include teacher dashboards, where formative assessment results are provided to the teacher in real-time to inform them of player status for further instruction and remediation.

The winning 2013 IES SBIR awards for games this year are:

Phase I

• World Explorador, CurriculaWorks, Lynn Krause
• Readorium Rising Reader: Smart Nonfiction Comprehension Software for Students in Grades 3-5., Mtelegence, Harriet Isecke
• Transmedia: Augmented Reality Game for Essential Transfer of Science, Second Avenue Software, Victoria Van Voorhis
• Science4U: Game-Based K2 STEM Education for Teachers and Students, vKiz, Inc., Catherine Christophe

Phase II                                                               

• Hall of Heroes: An Interactive Social Tutoring System to Improve and Measure Social Goals for Students in Preparation for Transition to Middle School, 3C Institute for Social Development, Melissa DeRosier (video)
• Go Games: Meeting Common Core Standards with Tablet-Enhanced Multiplayer Role Play Games, Filament Games, Beth Quinn (video)
• Empires: The First Socially-Networked Story-Based Math Game, Imagine Education, Scott Laidlaw (video)
• Teachley: MathFacts – Design and Development of Intervention Software for Promoting Single-Digit Operational Fluency, Teachley, LLC, Kara Carpenter (video)
• Numbershire II: Development of a Second Grade Game-Based Integrated Learning System to Target Whole Numbers and Operations in Base Ten and Operations in Algebraic Thinking, Thought Cycle, LLC, Marshall Gause (video)

Fast Track (Phase I & II)

• Dynamic E-Learning to Improve Postsecondary Transition Outcomes for Secondary Students with High Functioning Autism, 3C Institute for Social Development, Debra Childress
• Mission US: An Interactive Solution for Middle School History Learning, Electric Funstuff, David Langendoen
• SciSkillQuest: A Standards-Based Game to Develop Students’ Scientific Skills, Academic Mindsets, and Learning Strategies in Science, Mindset Works, Inc., Lisa Sorich Blackwell

Information about other awards can be found here.

Congratulations to all the winners and we can’t wait to see what’s coming next!

Mark DeLoura is Senior Advisor for Digital Media at OSTP

Edward Metz is a developmental psychologist and Director of the Institute of Education Sciences’ Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program.

Today marks the final day of an eventful Teacher Appreciation Week (May 6th-10th). The Department of Education joined millions across the country to celebrate teachers for their dedication and hard work, but also to listen to teachers on how we can help them in improving our schools and the teaching profession. With so many exciting things going on this week, we’ve compiled a few highlights of how the Department of Education celebrated 2013 Teacher Appreciation Week.

Celebrating and Listening to Our Nations Teachers

Secretary Duncan kicked off this year’s Teacher Appreciation week by encouraging others to not only take a more active role in honoring teachers, but to listen to them actively and celebrate their great work. Celebrating teachers for one week is appropriate Duncan said, but “what our teachers really need—and deserve—is our ongoing commitment to work with them to transform America’s schools.” Read the entire blog post.

More Substantive and Lasting than a Bagel Breakfast

In an article posted on SmartBlogs on Education, Duncan reiterated the importance of year-round support for teachers, noting that “teachers have earned every bagel breakfast, celebratory bulletin board, gift card and thank-you note,” but that “we need to do something a bit more substantive and lasting than the bagel breakfast, too.”

Steven Hicks, a senior policy advisory for early learning visited Benning Elementary Campus Early Childhood faculty in D.C., as part of “ED Goes Back to School Day.”

ED Goes Back to School

During the week ED officials from across the country went “Back to School,” to shadow teachers in classrooms. Over 65 officials took part in the second annual event designed to give Department officials an opportunity to witness the day in the life of a teacher and hear directly about ways the Department can greater support their work and better understand the demands placed upon teachers. Following the regular teaching day, officials and teachers met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and other senior officials to discuss their experiences and share lessons learned.

Celebrating African American Teachers in the Classroom

Early in the week, ED hosted a Google+ Hangout at Howard University to celebrate African American teachers in the classroom. The Hangout, moderated by NBC News’ Tamron Hall, comprised of African American educators from across the country, discussed the rewards of teaching, the critical role of good teachers, and the challenges they face in preparing students for college and careers. Watch the archived version of the Hangout.

Highlights from Teacher Appreciation Day on Twitter

Thousands took to Twitter this week to share heartfelt tributes and stories of the teachers who have inspired them. Check out our collection of some of the best from Teacher Appreciation Day. For updates on the latest information from ED, follow @USEDGOV & Secretary @ArneDuncan on Twitter.

Phoning Thanks

Estelle Moore, a 2nd grade teacher at Greencastle Elementary School in Silver Spring, Md., got a surprise phone call in honor of Teacher Appreciation Day on Tuesday, May 7—she was one of five teachers across the country to get a surprise “thank you” phone call from Secretary Duncan. Ms. Moore has taught for more than four decades and has been with Maryland County Public Schools for 39 years.

Click here for an alternate version of the video with an accessible player

Kelsey Donohue is a senior at Marist College (N.Y.), and an intern in ED’s Office of Communications and Outreach