For the past two decades, lawmakers from both parties in Ohio have invested heavily in the public education sector. As a consequence, total K-12 education funding, measured in constant dollars, has grown by over 60 percent since 1997, even as Ohio's K-12 student enrollment has shrunk by more than 24,000 students (1.4 percent) during that same…

Education policy leaders from across the political spectrum identified and evaluated four models that national standards and testing could take. These models are: (1) "The Whole Enchilada," the most direct and aggressive approach in which the federal government creates and enforces national standards and assessments, replacing the current 50…

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…

At the request of Ohio's top government and education leaders, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Association of Charter School Authorizers, and National Alliance for Public Charter Schools have issued a report seeking to strengthen the state's charter school program. Among its 17 recommendations are calls for closing low-performing charter…

The importance of state academic standards soared in January 2002 with passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Not only does that milestone law require all states to have demanding academic standards in place and to demonstrate steady student progress toward academic proficiency as set forth in those standards, it also links states'…

Two decades after the United States was diagnosed as "a nation at risk," academic standards for our primary and secondary schools are more important than ever?and their quality matters enormously. In 1983, as nearly every American knows, the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared that "The educational foundations of our society…

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…