Two years ago, only 150 students attended Holabird Elementary, then a K-5 school in the southeastern corner of this city. Competition from charters and from regular public schools in nearby Baltimore County had drained families from Holabird, a chronic underperformer. So when Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive officer of the Baltimore city…

The closely watched search for a new superintendent in Boston has taken such a rocky turn that the search committee's revised timeline now envisions January as the starting time for the new schools chief. The district's search committee had planned to select a group of finalists who would then go through public interviews before the school…

In 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in "Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka," the South Lawndale neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side was home primarily to Polish and Czech immigrants. In the decades since, South Lawndale has undergone dramatic change. Eastern Europeans moved out, and people of Mexican…

While researchers generally agree that literacy skills should be taught directly to adolescents across the curriculum, and that there are adequate research-based strategies for doing so, expets point out that much of that information has failed to reach the classroom, or has been ignored by teachers, who are either ill prepared or disinclined to…