The COVID-19 pandemic has redoubled attention to the challenges families face in making sure their children are fully prepared and supported in their journey through school. This first of three Quality Counts 2021 installments provides grades and scores for the nation and each state on a range of factors setting students up for success in school…

The first round of this year's high-school-match notifications in New York City's massive, district-wide school choice process went out to students this month, sparking celebration, consternation, and a renewal of concerns about unequal access to the city's best schools. The Big Apple's school-matching system is certainly on a New York scale, with…

A national survey finds that, when it comes to sexual harassment in school, many students do not know where to draw the line. Based on the first nationally representative survey in a decade of students in grades 7-12, the study conducted by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), found that 48 percent of nearly 2,000 students surveyed…

Policy experts are renewing questions about the role of school culture and leadership in the drive to improve teaching effectiveness in the most-challenging school environments. As states and districts increasingly explore tactics like performance-based pay, incentive programs, and bonuses to attract the best teachers to troubled schools, experts…

This article reports that amid tight budgets and shrinking revenue, states are wagering that voters in next month's elections will agree to expand state-sanctioned gambling in exchange for increased school aid. Initiatives on six state ballots Nov. 4 involve gambling revenue intended to raise money for everything from community college funding and…

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by John McCain's campaign as an attempt to push radicalism on schools. Founders of the project say it has been distorted in the presidential campaign. The project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected, however,…

Chanelle Brown has not found much she can relate to in the classic texts assigned in her English classes at Evanston Township High School. A top student, the junior has toiled through "The Odyssey," "All the King's Men," "The Scarlet Letter," and other standards, she said, while many of her classmates at the suburban Chicago school have given up…

How many teachers stay, especially in the schools that need them most? The question has attracted widespread attention as policymakers have recognized that expert teaching is the most important school-related factor in student achievement. Data show that poor and minority students assigned to ineffective teachers lag significantly behind their…

Having developed a technology-based teaching unit on weather that appeared to work well for middle school students, Nancy Butler Songer and her colleagues at the University of Michigan decided in the late 1990s to take the next logical step in their research program: They scaled up. This article discusses lessons learned by several faculty…

Three decades of mounting academic and testing requirements are snagging growing numbers of students in the 9th grade. "The bulge" is the name education researchers give to the percentage increase in students in the 9th grade over the same period. This article reports on factors that might explain the growing 9th grade bottleneck and…