Since their start in Houston in 1994, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter schools have been the most celebrated of the No Excuses schools. Employing strict discipline, an extended school day and year, and carefully selected teachers, No Excuses schools move disadvantaged students who start behind their peers academically up to and above…

As public budgets have grown tighter over the past decade, states and school districts have sought ways to control the growth of spending. One increasingly common strategy employed to rein in costs is to offer experienced teachers with high salaries financial incentives to retire early. Although early retirement incentive (ERI) programs have been…

Research has been showing that the most important development in K-12 education over the past decade has been the emergence of a growing number of urban schools that have been convincingly shown to have dramatic positive effects on the achievement of disadvantaged students. Those with the strongest evidence of success are oversubscribed charter…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of charter schools designed to improve the educational opportunities available to low-income families. KIPP schools seek to boost their students' academic achievement and ultimately prepare them to enroll and succeed in college. To achieve these objectives, KIPP schools leverage strong…

This article describes an Oakland Unified schools program of "blended learning" that is designed to reach students who are academically all over the map. Blended learning combines brick-and-mortar schooling with online education "with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace" of learning. The program…

This article describes the grim sentiments from the U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, when reviewing the poor results from the U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). He noted a straightforward and stark picture of educational stagnation--that fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. today are average in…

Today's education technology holds immense promise, but what matters more than the tools themselves are how they are used in schools and in classrooms. In "Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age," Frederick M. Hess and Bror Saxberg argue that educators have tended to think of adopting technology as a way to "reform" or…

Named Charter Leader of the Year in 2010 by the California Charter Schools Association, Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is responsible for the generation of multiple transformative schools and a radically different teaching model for Summit. Summit's first charter high school, Summit Prep, launched in 2003, was featured in the…

Three million students in the United States are classified as gifted, yet little is known about the effectiveness of traditional gifted and talented (G&T) programs. In theory, G&T programs might help high-achieving students because they group them with other high achievers and typically offer specially trained teachers and a more advanced…

This article features Khan Academy which offers an online math program and short video lectures embedded in the "module", or math concept, that fit students' goals. By now, more than 1 million people have watched the online video in which Salman Khan--a charming MIT math whiz, Harvard Business School graduate, and former Boston hedge-fund…

Policymakers nationwide continue to wrestle with a basic question: At what grade level should students move to a new school? In the most common grade configuration in American school districts, public school students make two school transitions, entering a middle school in grade 6 or 7 and a high school in grade 9. This pattern reflects the…

In this study, the author investigates whether the opportunity to attend a school other than a student's assigned neighborhood school reduces criminal activity, especially among disadvantaged youth. Many of the schools chosen by the students were "better" on traditional indicators, such as student test scores and teacher characteristics. All of…

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.…

The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional…

Data-driven instruction began its spread across the country about a decade ago, in the footsteps of the No Child Left Behind requirement that schools administer yearly achievement tests. Those tests didn't help teachers spot and backfill learning gaps, though. Scores came back after everyone had moved on to the next grade, and anyway, the tests…