The greatest challenge facing America's schools today isn't the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or "teacher quality." It's the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What's needed…

In his first major education speech as a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama affirmed his support of teachers unions. Less than two years later, in his first major education address as president, delivered to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March 2009, Obama explicitly backed paying teachers for performance, a reform the unions…

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…

Programs that enable students to attend private schools, including both vouchers and scholarships funded with tax credits, have become increasingly common in recent years. This study examines the impact of the nation's largest private school scholarship program on the performance of students who remain in the public schools. The Florida Tax Credit…

This article describes school models that offer a vision for what deeply integrated technology can mean for children's education, for the way schools are structured, and for the promise of greater efficiency amid a lengthy economic downturn. This is much more than simply taking a class online. Already, millions of children take one or more online…

While much of the debate around Teach For America (TFA) in recent years has focused on the effectiveness of its nontraditional recruits in the classroom, the real story is the degree to which TFA has succeeded in producing dynamic, impassioned, and entrepreneurial education leaders. From its inception as Wendy Kopp's senior thesis project at…

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…

In this article, the author talks about the resignation of New York State's commissioner of education David Steiner, and how it will affect the state's Race to the Top. He contends that Steiner was savvy enough to understand the importance of Race to the Top and able enough to turn the state's education energies toward it. The "Washington Post"…

The magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning…

For a decade, at least since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the nation's foremost education goal has been to erase achievement "gaps" in which African American, Latino, and low-income students dramatically lag behind their peers. This emphasis has enjoyed broad support through the Bush and Obama administrations, and from major funders, but…

In recent years, a consensus has emerged among researchers that teacher quality matters enormously for student performance. Students taught by more-effective teachers learn substantially more over the course of the year than students taught by less-effective teachers. Yet little is known about what makes for a more-effective teacher. Most research…

Recently, two separate studies--one by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education, the other by a committee constituted by the National Research Council (NRC)--have sought to discredit the work of Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of schools for the District of Columbia. According to Ginsburg,…

In this article, the authors explore the following questions: How have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large? In addition to the views of the…

Online K-12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages--math, science, foreign languages--and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever…

Charter schools are approaching the ripe old age of 20. Although more work remains if one is to fully understand this complex education reform "movement," a growing body of data and research is being compiled about its strengths, weaknesses, and impact. An important subset of the charter school sector is just now receiving a similar level of…