What to do about persistently low-performing schools is a pressing challenge for policymakers and educators across the nation. Schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) for five consecutive years under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) must be "restructured". The 3,500 schools in the United States currently in…

America's education system, from kindergarten through the state university, is designed to produce college graduates. Those who stop short of at least a community-college diploma are widely regarded as failures, or at least victims of a failed system. Yet most Americans fall into this category, and current trends offer little hope for improvement.…

The majority of students are leaving high school without the reading and writing skills needed to succeed in college and a career. Many of the more than 700,000 students who leave U.S. high schools each year without a diploma have low literacy skills. In America today, one in five students fails to graduate from high school on time. The…

In May 2016, an invitational symposium on the Reading for Understanding (RfU) initiative was held in Alexandria, Virginia. Co-hosted by ETS and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the symposium brought together some 160 state and local education leaders to examine the results of the Reading for Understanding Initiative. The goal of…

An important contest is taking place in Washington, D.C.--a race between two vehicles designed to carry children into the future with the habits and skills they need to live productive, meaningful lives. The older of the two, the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), uses a "unified governance model" that emerged more than a…

Far too often, school leaders fail to consider how technology might dramatically improve teaching and learning, and schools frequently acquire digital devices without discrete learning goals and ultimately use these devices in ways that fail to adequately serve students, schools, or taxpayers. Because of a growing debate concerning spending on…

Despite a pending policy change aimed at including more students with disabilities and English-language learners (ELLs) in the "nation's report card," the federal agency that administers the national testing program appears to be softening the penalty for states that fail to improve inclusion rates. The disagreement underscores the…

In 1992 the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation (AAUW) Educational Foundation published "How Schools Shortchange Girls," a landmark report providing overwhelming evidence that girls were often ignored in the classroom and neglected in the curriculum. This report brought gender equity to the forefront of…

Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other sources suggests that both the content and structure of our school science curricula are generally incongruent with the ideals of the scientific enterprise. By neglecting the kinds of instructional activities that make purposeful connections between the study and…