The quality of the teacher workforce in the United States is of considerable concern to education stakeholders and policymakers. Numerous studies show that student academic success depends in no small part on access to high-quality teachers. Many pundits point to the fact that in the United States, teachers tend not to be drawn from the top of the…

Two themes connect Brazil and Chile: one is economic success; the other is social unrest. Protests rocked cities across Brazil in June 2013, and in Chile, recent student protests turned violent. Yet living conditions in both nations are better now than they've ever been. Successful economic and social reforms over the last two decades have…

The Texas Ten Percent Plan (TTP) provides students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class with automatic admission to any public university in the state, including the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. Texas created the policy in 1997 after a federal appellate court ruled that the state's…

Ensuring college access amid rising tuition costs has hovered near the top of the nation's education agenda for years. Facing heightened concern about the student debt burden and disappointing college graduation rates, policymakers are hungry for fresh ideas. Federal Pell Grants, the primary means for subsidizing college tuition for…

For almost as long as there have been institutions dedicated to the preparation of new teachers, the endeavor has come in for criticism. Teacher education has long struggled both to professionalize and to fully integrate itself into mainstream academia. At the core of this struggle was a perception that there was no body of specialized knowledge…

In 1996, Cardinal John J. O'Connor, archbishop of New York, proposed to Rudy Crew, chancellor of the New York City public school system, that the city's most troubled public-school students be sent to Catholic schools, where he would see that they were given an education. New York City's mayor at that time, Rudolph Giuliani, a…

For this study, the authors designed an experiment to test whether some high-achieving, low-income students would change their behavior if they knew more about colleges and, more importantly, whether a cost-effective way to help such students realize their full array of college opportunities can be implemented. This was done by randomly assigning…

Education reform is not a new or foreign trend in Wisconsin. The state was a school choice pioneer and one of the first to embrace charter schools in the early 1990s. Though major reform efforts have been on the back burner in recent years, topics like value-added analysis and teacher evaluation have kept education on the front page in the Badger…

The past few years have seen a raft of efforts to reform teacher evaluation, pay, and tenure. Amid all this, less attention has been paid to another thorny question, the role of teacher preparation in licensing teachers for the field. In this issue's forum, both contributors agree that teacher preparation requires some big changes. Making the…

Teachers are increasingly recognized as the most important in-school factor in student achievement, yet the quality of the country's K-12 teaching force is not up to snuff. Much of the blame has been placed on education schools, which have come under fire for failing to produce enough high-performing teachers. Both initial certification…

Spreading accountability from the teacher back to the education school is an idea the Obama administration is also promoting in its efforts to remake teacher training. This spring, a federal panel looking at teacher-preparation programs debated, among other things, rating education schools based on how much their teachers add to student learning.…

Charter school management organizations (CMOs) have emerged as a popular means for bringing charter schooling to scale. Advocates credit CMOs with delivering a coherent model of charter schooling to a growing number of children across numerous sites. Skeptics have wondered whether CMOs constitute an effective management approach, whether they…

A century ago, often under pressure from labor unions, states passed seat-time and mandatory-attendance laws that compelled youngsters to stay in school, and out of the competition for jobs. The laws haven't changed much today, but kids have, and by their midteens, many of them--bored with high school or academically beyond it--are ready for the…

Two months before his 2008 election, Barack Obama addressed a roomful of Ohio public school teachers, praising their long hours and talking about his daughters' starting 2nd and 5th grade. Then Obama departed from the usual feel-good talking points. He touted competition, charter schools, and school choice. Two and a half years later, Republicans…

Debates about gender and schooling have taken a surprising turn in the past decade. After years of concern that girls were being shortchanged in male-dominated schools, especially in math and science, there has grown a rising chorus of voices worrying about whether boys are the ones in peril. With young women making up close to 60 percent of…