Kansas, Montana, and New York are the states currently under orders from their highest courts to fix their school finance systems. In Kansas, House and Senate leaders have agreed to a plan that would increase per-pupil funding for at-risk, bilingual, and special education students. It would also create a $20 million program to help districts…

This article describes an academic choice program in Texas public schools where 8th graders are being given a choice of three different academic plans to follow through graduation, two of which are distinctively tougher than the third. Policymakers in Texas, Arkansas, and Indiana are opting to raise academic standards by making a college-prep…

College-based programs that motivate underachieving teenagers to graduate and pursue further education is part of a menu of initiatives Guilford County, North Carolina, has introduced to meet the academic, social, and emotional needs of students in its middle and high schools, where racial and ethnic diversity and poverty have been on the rise. As…

High school exams that are based on state standards are changing what and how students learn, whether or not they have high stakes attached to them, a report on two school districts suggests. Because of such tests in Virginia and Maryland, teachers are focused on ensuring that students are prepared to take and pass the exams, according to case…

For now, it appears that both the New Orleans district, Louisiana's largest, and the nearby St. Bernard public schools could be largely out of commission for the whole school year, state Superintendent Cecil J. Picard said. With officials estimating that more than 230,000 public and private school students from Louisiana had been displaced by the…

New Orleans will probably never be the same after Hurricane Katrina. But when it comes to schools, many educators and analysts say that might not be all bad. Both in Louisiana and beyond, the wreckage in the Big Easy has sparked thinking about how the city might reinvent its beleaguered school system, in difficult straits long before the storm was…

More special education students are being excluded from federal accountability provisions, driving up the number of public schools able to make adequate yearly progress and raising questions about the pledge to "leave no child behind." To make adequate progress under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, public schools and districts need…

Washington is a safe distance from the powerful winds that have wreaked havoc on the Gulf Coast, but a political storm continued to brew in the capital over President Bush's plan to help pay the costs of private school tuition for students displaced by Hurricane Katrina. As voucher opponents decried the president's plan, Louisiana's two U.S.…

Struggling to jump-start education in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, the district school board has decided to reopen its first buildings not as regular public schools, but as charter schools. Indeed, the board's vote followed weeks of high-level talks among officials in the offices of the governor, the state schools superintendent, the state…

Five weeks after Katrina landed in Louisiana, Bonnabel and 78 other Jefferson Parish schools were welcoming students back--and far sooner than many had expected. The worst damage in Louisiana from Hurricane Katrina did not come to Jefferson Parish. That distinction was reserved for portions of New Orleans, as well as St. Bernard Parish, where…

State standards for academic content vary enormously in how well they cover the topic of evolution, with many of those documents either ignoring or giving scant treatment to the core principles of that established scientific theory. This article presents the analysis of Education Week on state's standards treatment of evolution. Nearly all the…

Seeking to grasp what she called a "golden opportunity for rebirth" out of the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina, Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco asked the Louisiana legislature last week to embrace a plan that would give the state control of most New Orleans public schools. This article talks about the governor's plan to let the state…

For more than 10 years, the education community has watched the corporate ups and downs of Edison Schools Inc., the New York City company that has created controversy with its aim of making money from public schools. Long a target of those wary of such aims, the now privately held Edison made headlines with its four-year run as a public company,…

This document and accompanying disk contain all of the articles from an "Education Week" special report examining the complex phenomenon commonly known as the "information highway" and how it affects the nation's schools. The articles, all by Peter West, include: (1) "Logged On for Learning," an overview of the…

This special newspaper edition is a collection of articles based on a journalist's interviews with American Indian educators in urban public schools, Bureau of Indian Affairs schools, and tribally controlled school districts. The introduction, entitled "The High Cost of Endurance" outlines the high risk status of Native American…