5. The Ever-Worsening Student Loan Crisis

　　With average student debt this year climbing to an all-time high of $26,500, the issue took on new prominence when a study by the Pew Research Center found that—for the first time in history—nearly 20% of U.S. households have outstanding student loan debt. College debt, which had already outpaced credit card debt, topped $1 trillion this year—also a first. Many students and college administrators have started to question the bang that higher education delivers for all those bucks. In a poll sponsored by TIME and the Carnegie Corporation of New York this fall, 80% of U.S. adults surveyed said that at many colleges, the education students receive is not worth what they pay for it. And although President Obama started 2012 by issuing a plan to make college costs more transparent and lower the monthly repayments for some borrowers, the majority of debt holders will feel the pain for years, if not decades, to come。

　　5、日益恶化的助学贷款危机

　　今年随着学生平均债务水平攀高至26500美元，这个问题了新的突出地位，皮尤研究中心的研究发现，在历史上首次，近20%的美国家庭拥有大量的学生贷款债务。高校债务第一次超过了信用卡债务高达一万亿美元。许多学生和高校管理者开始怀疑邦高等教育提供的这些钱。在一项今年秋季，时代杂志和纽约卡内基公司的民意调查中，80%被调查的美国成年人说，在许多高校，学生所接受的已经是没有什么值得他们付出的教育了。尽管美国总统奥巴马2012年启动了一个计划，使大学的费用更加透明，并降低一些借款人的每月还款的债务，但是多数还债人还是会在未来数年甚至几十年内感到痛苦。

　　4. UVA President Ousted—Then Reinstated

　　On June 10 the University of Virginia’s governing board shocked the campus community when it issued a short, cryptic statement announcing the resignation of the school’s popular president, Teresa Sullivan. In the statement, the head of the board, Rector Helen Dragas, thanked Sullivan for her service during her two years on the job, but noted, “In a rapidly changing and highly pressurized external environment in both health care and academia, we believe that the university needs to remain at the forefront of change。” In the two weeks that followed, a professor resigned in protest, the board’s vice-rector stepped down and students and faculty held rallies in support of Sullivan on campus. (Someone even spray-painted the world “GREED” on the columns of the school’s famed Rotunda building。) The chaos intensified, and speculation over what prompted Sullivan’s ouster swirled until June 26, when the board turned on its heels, voting unanimously to reinstate the president. “It’s time to bring the university family back together,” Dragas said。

　　4、弗吉尼亚理工大学校长被废除，现在已经恢复

　　6月10日弗吉尼亚州的大学管理委员会发出短促的，神秘的，震惊的校园的声明，受学生欢迎的校长邓丽君沙利文，宣布辞职。在声明中，董事会主席，校长海伦德拉加什，为沙利文在她的两年的工作时间内所做的表示感谢，但他指出，“在一个迅速变化和高压力的外部环境下，我们相信无论在医疗保健还是学术界，大学需要保持在变革的前沿。”在随后的两个星期中，教授辞职以示抗议，董事会的副校长下台，支持沙利文的学生和教师在校园中举行集会。甚至有人在学校的著名的圆形大厅上喷涂“贪婪”的世界。混乱加剧，大家猜测是什么促使沙利文下台，直到6月26日，当董事会回归正常之后后，投票一致决定，恢复校长。“是时候把学校大家庭带回来的时候了”德拉加什说。

　　3. Malala and the Fight for Girls’ Education Worldwide

　　Malala Yousafzai started blogging about the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education when she was just 11 years old, telling al-Jazeera in a 2010 interview, “If this new generation is not given pens, they will be given guns by terrorists。” At 14, she was shot—along with two of her classmates—by Taliban assailants on the girls’ way home from school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. She survived the Oct. 9 shooting, in which a bullet grazed her brain, and is now recovering at a hospital in Britain, where her fight for girls’ education continues. Some 32 million girls worldwide are denied access to education; in Pakistan some five million children do not go to school. A month after Yousafzai was shot, the Pakistani government announced that it will adopt new measure to get every child into school by the end of 2015.

　　3、Malala 和世界范围内争取女童的教育

　　Malala Yousafzai 当她11岁的时候开始写关于塔利班禁止女孩的教育的博客，在2010年的一次采访中她告诉半岛电视台，“如果没有给新一代年轻人笔，那么恐怖分子将给予他们枪。”14岁的她以及她的两个同学在巴基斯坦的斯瓦特山谷从学校回家的路上，被塔利班袭击者枪击。她在10月9日的枪击事件中幸存，其中一颗子弹擦过她的大脑，现在她在英国的一家医院中接受治疗，期间她仍然继续为女孩的教育抗争。全球约有32万女孩被剥夺了受教育的权利。在巴基斯坦有大约500万儿童没有去学校上学。在Yousafzai枪击事件发生一个月之后，巴基斯坦政府宣布到2015年底，将采取新的措施，让每一位儿童到学校上学。

　　2. Chicago Teachers Hit the Picket Lines

　　After 10 months of negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union and city officials failed to yield a new contract, teachers took to the streets. More than 29,000 teachers and support staff walked out of classrooms in the nation’s third largest school district on Sept. 10, leaving some 350,000 students idle. “After 15 years of a fixation on testing, closing schools and being poked in the eye by the mayor, teachers finally said, ‘enough was enough,’” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is the parent organization

　　of the Chicago Teachers Union, told TIME. The strike lasted seven days, and the deal that was struck behind closed doors was viewed largely as a win for the unions. But the fight over teachers’ contacts is anything but over as the same issues debated in Chicago—evaluations, merit pay, tenure and length of the school day—are being hammered out nationwide. “What I think it’s done, more than anything, is change the conversation,” Weingarten said of the showdown in Chicago. “There had been this unholy alliance between some mayors, governors who are dealing with budget cut after budget cut and as a result not wanting to make public education a priority, combined with lots of these so-called reformers who simply want to tell teachers to do more with less, ignore their voice and then blame them when things don’t go how they think they should go。”

　　2、芝加哥教师冲击警戒线

　　芝加哥教师工会和市政府官员经过10个月的的谈判没有取得一份新的合约，教师们走上街头。9月10日在全国第三大的学校学区超过29,000名教师和支持人员走出教室的，造成约35万学生闲置。“15年来市长的眼中执着于测试，关闭学校和挑选教师，教师们最后说，“够了，受够了，”兰迪万家顿告诉时代杂志记者，他是美国教师联合会主席，该联合会是上级组织的芝加哥教师工会。罢工持续了七天，最后签署的协议被视为工会的胜利。但是教师们在芝加哥讨论着相同的问题——绩效工资，职位和学校工作日的长度——这被视为一个全国性的问题。“我认为它这样做，最重要的是，改变了对话的方式”魏因加滕说，“在芝加哥的罢工中”。“曾在一些市长，州长中有过一种罪恶的联盟，他们一再地削减预算，与此同时带来的结果是他们不想让公共教育有优先的权利，也有很多这样所谓的改革者，他们只是想告诉老师们少花钱多办事，忽视他们的声音，然后当一切没有朝着他们的预想发展的时候责备老师们。

　　1. Planet of the MOOCs

　　In the education world, 2012 could be called the year of the MOOC. The silly-sounding acronym, short for massive open online courses, covers a new breed of online classes that is shaking up the higher education world in ways that could be good for cash-strapped students. That’s because the classes are free and open to any student anywhere. MOOCs first made waves in the fall of 2011 when then-Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun—inspired

　　by the free video tutorials Salman Khan has been making for k-12 students—put his graduate-level artificial intelligence course online, opened it up to the public, and 160,000 people in more than 190 countries signed up for the free class. In January, Thrun launched Udacity, a private company with a dozen online-only courses that students can complete at their own pace. A similar startup, created by two Stanford computer-science professors, called Coursera, launched in April and now boasts nearly three dozen major university partners, including Columbia, Duke and Princeton. The third major player in this space, edX, was launched in May by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. It’s hard to say what the long-term impact of MOOCs will be—more than a million students have enrolled in them, but completion rates are low. Perhaps what will motivate more students to finish is increasing the likelihood that these online courses will help people get a job。

　　1、MOOCs(大规模的网络开放课程)的星球

　　在教育领域，2012年可以被称作大规模的网络开放课程之年。这种近似愚蠢而又冠冕堂皇的首字母缩写，大规模开放在线课程，它涵盖的是一个全新的，震动了高等教育界的，一种对于囊中羞涩的学生可能是个好的方式在线课程类型。这是因为这些课程对任何地方任何学生都是免费开放的。MOOCs于2011年秋天掀起了第一次波澜，当时的斯坦福大学教授塞巴斯蒂安·史朗灵感来自于萨尔曼·汗一直在为K-12学生做的免费的视频课程，教授把他的研究生水平的人工智能课程面向公众放在网上，超过190个国家和地区160,000人注册了免费课程。一月，史朗推出一家私人公司Udacity和十几门学生能依照自己的进度在网上完成的课程。类似的，由两个斯坦福大学计算机科学教授，四月推出的被称为Coursera网站，现在拥有近三十多个重点大学的合作伙伴，包括哥伦比亚大学，杜克和普林斯顿大学。在这个领域第三个重要角色，edX，于5月由美国麻省理工学院和哈佛大学联合推出。超过一百万学生已加入的MOOCs将带来什么长期的影响还很难说，但其学业完成率还很低。也许如果这些在线课程能帮助学生获得工作的话，那么它将会激发更多的学生完成这些课程。

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