After a steady increase throughout the middle of the 20th century, arts education has been in decline since the 1980s. Teachers attributed the declines to test-score pressures, budget cuts, or both. These trends have been most pronounced for students of color, who are more likely than white students to attend under-resourced schools and about half…

The Chicago International Charter School (CICS) Irving Park's middle school is one of 130 schools nationwide piloting the Summit Learning Program (SLP), developed--and offered entirely free--by Summit Public Schools, a high-performing charter network based in California. Summit's eight schools, two of them in Washington State, are known for an…

The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) is a network of charter schools designed to improve the educational opportunities available to low-income families. KIPP schools seek to boost their students' academic achievement and ultimately prepare them to enroll and succeed in college. To achieve these objectives, KIPP schools leverage strong…

This article describes an Oakland Unified schools program of "blended learning" that is designed to reach students who are academically all over the map. Blended learning combines brick-and-mortar schooling with online education "with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace" of learning. The program…

Named Charter Leader of the Year in 2010 by the California Charter Schools Association, Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is responsible for the generation of multiple transformative schools and a radically different teaching model for Summit. Summit's first charter high school, Summit Prep, launched in 2003, was featured in the film…

Policymakers nationwide continue to wrestle with a basic question: At what grade level should students move to a new school? In the most common grade configuration in American school districts, public school students make two school transitions, entering a middle school in grade 6 or 7 and a high school in grade 9. This pattern reflects the…

Data-driven instruction began its spread across the country about a decade ago, in the footsteps of the No Child Left Behind requirement that schools administer yearly achievement tests. Those tests didn't help teachers spot and backfill learning gaps, though. Scores came back after everyone had moved on to the next grade, and anyway, the tests…

Suspended "between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach." Indeed, one can't touch middle school without hearing about "raging hormones." By all accounts, middle schools are a weak link in the chain of public education. Is it the churn of ill-conceived attempts at reform that's causing all the problems? Is…

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…

Could middle schools be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That's what some educators have come to believe. States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which…

The federal law No Child Left Behind (NCLB) requires states to "restructure" any school that fails for six years running to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) toward full proficiency on the part of all students by the year 2014. The law provides a number of restructuring options, including turning over the school's management to a…

KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) offers training for teachers designed to turn them into school principals with an entrepreneur's skill set. Teacher Jason Singer underwent KIPP training and now recruits 5th-grade students for the charter middle school he opened. KIPP, which was founded in 1994 by Teach For America alums Michael Feinberg and David…

In this article, the author discusses how, despite of the advances in today's technology, the way children are educated now is remarkably similar to how they were educated decades ago. More than any other modern-day institution, schooling is nearly impervious to change. He notes that America's "old school design" is not working with high degree of…