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…

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether American schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the…

Teacher benefits, once a sleepy question primarily of interest to actuaries, have become a flash point in the education debate. With individual states on the hook for tens or hundreds of millions in unfunded pension and health insurance obligations, state leaders are trying to determine the severity of the situation and the appropriate response.…

If principals have the authority to dismiss teachers, will they dismiss the less effective ones, or will they instead make perverse decisions by letting the good teachers go? Evidence from low-stakes surveys suggests that principals are able to identify the most and least effective teachers in their schools, as measured by their impact on student…

Tough economic times mean tight school district budgets, possibly for years to come. Education is a labor-intensive industry, and because most districts devote well over half of all spending to teacher compensation, budget cuts have already led to the most substantial teacher layoffs in recent memory. Although the 2010 federal Education Jobs and…

To many education reformers, the passage of the federal government's massive stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), appeared to be a final bright star falling into alignment. The ARRA seemed to complete the constellation: an astounding $100 billion of new federal funds--nearly twice the annual budget of the U.S.…

Excellence was seldom to be found in 2006, when David Ferrero, an officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reviewed five firsthand, book-length accounts of teaching and learning at individual high schools. In one account, a rookie teacher, telling her own story, "struggles to establish authority in her classes and generally fails;...her…

In 2003, leaders at the School District of Philadelphia, district CEO Paul Vallas and chairman of the School Reform Commission James Nevels, enlisted the help of the Microsoft Corporation in a bold effort: reshape the archaic 19th-century high school model to better prepare students, especially urban students, to live and work in the 21st century.…

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding…

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…

Existing research provides little insight into the relative merits of universal programs and those targeted to specific groups. While there have been several recent studies of the short-term effects of universal preschool programs in the U.S., there is no evidence to date on long-term consequences. Some studies suggest that Head Start has lasting…

Most studies focus on the effects of charter attendance on short-term student achievement (test scores), using either data sets that follow students over time or random assignment via school admission lotteries to control for differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Beyond measuring achievement effects, however,…

From the moment of birth, Americans have a fascination with seeing how they measure up. They are a nation obsessed with the story told in numbers. The quality of public schools has been measured in innumerable ways, and stakeholders may draw on any number of sources for rankings to support a particular agenda. Each winter, "Education Week" issues…

Americans thrive on competition. But American schools have been suspicious of competition for generations, and are generally horrified by the idea that success should be accompanied by a reward like a title, a trophy, or a cash prize. In this article, the author stresses that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish…

Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, comes alive when recalling his start in local politics--as a labor organizer agitating for reform inside decrepit and overcrowded schools. In his quest to turn around the schools, the mayor has united working-class Latino parents, civil rights leaders, and big-money Democrats to challenge union…