President Barack Obama is calling for an ambitious overhaul of the federal E-rate program, a step that many education and technology advocates have been urging for years to improve what they see as schools' badly out-of-date technological capabilities. The administration intends to ask the Federal Communications Commission to consider rechanneling…

From the White House to Capitol Hill, the winners in this week's elections won't have much time to savor their victories. Even as federal policymakers sort out the political landscape, the remainder of 2012 and the early months of 2013 are likely to be dominated by divisive, unresolved issues with broad consequences for K-12 and higher…

Education advocates are already bracing for protracted budget battles in the coming year, even as they sort the winners and losers in the bill approved by Congress late last week financing the U.S. Department of Education and the rest of the federal government through September. The hard-fought agreement followed months of wrangling between…

The author reports on a review of state policies by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, which raises questions about the validity of the use of home-language surveys as a step to identify students eligible for special help in learning English. While it's ubiquitous in schools across the country, the practice of educators'…

President Barack Obama's proposed $49.7 billion budget for the U.S. Department of Education is more than just a spending blueprint: Department officials portray it as a fundamental reimagining of the agency's structure and management. Under the fiscal 2011 proposal unveiled last week, a roster of 38 relatively small, targeted grant programs would…

A Washington research group is raising questions about the wisdom of the U.S. Department of Education's favored strategies for turning around the lowest-performing schools with stimulus funding, saying that its research shows that similar federal approaches to school restructuring have not been effective. The questions raised by the new study were…

The No Child Left Behind Act has been the subject of intense debate in school board meetings, state legislatures, and Washington policy circles. Everywhere, it seems, but the presidential campaign--the winner of which may have the most important voice in reshaping the federal role in K-12 education. In their education proposals, Democratic Senator…

President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton have both enacted significant expansions in federal oversight of K-12 schools during their terms. In the combined 15 years of the Clinton and Bush presidencies so far, the federal government has required states to set academic goals for their students and has made schools and districts…