Well before President Barack Obama vaulted early childhood learning to the top of the education agenda in his recent State of the Union address, states were taking steps to bolster their own preschool programs. More than a dozen states--including some, such as Hawaii and Mississippi, that have had no state-financed preschool programs in the…

Even though 34 states and the District of Columbia have No Child Left Behind Act waivers in hand, many of them are still negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education over their teacher evaluation systems--a crucial component if they want to keep their newfound flexibility. More than six months after waiver recipients turned in their…

The 16 Race to the Top district winners, pushed by $400 million in federal grants that put a premium on personalized learning, are embarking on vastly different makeovers of the classroom experience--from districtwide approaches to a narrower blueprint focused on middle school math. Despite the divergent approaches, a review of the winning…

As part of an effort to improve the quality of educational research and make it less balkanized, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) have introduced a common set of evidence standards for federally funded work. The criteria will guide all new research at the IES, the U.S. Department of Education's…

After more than a year of heated campaigning, President Barack Obama remains in the White House, Democrats continue to control the U.S. Senate, and Republicans are still in charge of the House of Representatives--leaving unchanged a political landscape that has paralyzed congressional action on education policy and led the president to flex his…

As the number of English learners continues to grow faster than that of any other group in the nation's public schools, concerns are mounting that the distinctive needs of those students and the educators who work with them are receiving diminishing attention from the U.S. Department of Education. Even as the federal government spends roughly $750…

The list of 61 finalists for the latest Race to the Top competition shows that the U.S. Department of Education was successful in enticing high-scoring applications from districts in rural America and in states that had not shared in the Race to the Top bounty before. But whether the ultimate winners, which will be announced this month, will be…

School districts have resorted to hiring debt collectors, employing constables, and swapping out standard meals for scaled-back versions to try to coerce parents to pay off school lunch debt that, in recent years, appears to have surged as the result of a faltering economy and better record-keeping. While the average school lunch costs just about…

Grant recipients risk losing millions of dollars in Race to the Top money if they fail to live up to their promises, federal education officials make clear. By threatening to revoke Hawaii's $75 million Race to the Top award for failing to make "adequate progress" on key milestones of its education reform plan, U.S. Secretary of…

The 12 winners of the federal Race to the Top competition have experienced near-universal challenges in turning their sweeping, multifaceted proposals into reality, among them a limited state capacity to execute fast, dramatic change and deeply rooted teacher-evaluation systems that have proved hard to transform. Reports unveiled by the U.S.…

Virtual education is moving into that intersection where rising popularity meets calls for greater accountability. How the virtual education movement responds to those calls will have a significant impact on how it evolves in K-12 over the next five to 10 years. This report tackles this shift in the virtual education landscape. It examines the…

The latest batch of states seeking relief under the No Child Left Behind Act dodge pitfalls that tripped up the first round of applicants. In the latest round of applications for waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act, states have learned lessons from their predecessors and dodged pitfalls that triggered some big revisions from first-round…

The federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains a work in progress after two years, with more than 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no definitive verdict on its effectiveness. The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, supercharged by a…

Almost two years into the federal Race to the Top program, states are spending their shares of the $4 billion prize at a snail's pace--a reflection of the challenges the 12 winners face as they try to get ambitious education improvement plans off the ground. Through the end of March, the 11 states and the District of Columbia had spent just 14…

Three big-city districts--Chicago, Milwaukee, and New York--have terminated federal grants aimed at promoting performance-based compensation plans and professional development for teachers and principals. Overall, the 2010 Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grants to the three districts would have provided an $88 million payout over five years--nearly 7…