Public school principals encounter a sizable gap between the autonomy they believe they need to be effective and the autonomy that they actually have in practice, especially when it comes to hiring, firing, and transferring teachers. That is a key finding of this report from the Fordham Institute and the American Institutes for Research, which is…

This report presents findings from a national examination of the organizations that sponsor, oversee and hold accountable U.S. charter schools. Its primary aim is to describe and characterize these crucial but little known organizations: What do they look like? How big are they? How do they go about their work? The results of this inquiry is a new…

Of all the controversies swirling around the nation's charter schools, none is more hotly contested than the debate over funding. Charter opponents charge that these autonomous public schools are draining scarce resources from public school districts. Proponents, by contrast, complain that charter schools do not get their fair share of public…

Findings from this Fordham-sponsored survey--the fourth survey of Dayton, Ohio parent/community attitudes toward education since 1988--present a fascinating array of opinions about today's schools (and those who are responsible for them) and the changes that could be made tomorrow. Over 70 percent of Dayton-area parents support the idea of…

This project evaluated 30 state accountability systems, including each state's academic standards, assessments (in both reading and math and for elementary, middle, and high school), and the accountability policies that define success and failure and provide both positive and negative incentives for success. The 30 accountability systems evaluated…