In this essay, Jack Schneider and Andrew Saultz offer a new perspective on state and federal power through their analysis of authority and control. Due to limitations inherent to centralized governance, state and federal offices of education exercised little control over schools across much of the twentieth century, even as they acquired…

In this essay, Brian D. Lozenski explores why Gloria Ladson-Billings's 2006 pronouncement of the nation's "education debt," as opposed to "achievement gap," has not gained traction in the national discourse around educational disparity. He contends that education debt is a more nuanced, historically based, and generative…

In this essay, Jal Mehta examines the challenges faced by American schooling and the reasons for persistent failure of American school reforms to achieve successful educational outcomes at scale. He concludes that many of the problems faced by American schools are artifacts of the bureaucratic form in which the education sector as a whole was…

In this article, Luis O. Reyes provides a retrospective of the historic 1974 Aspira Consent Decree between the New York City Board of Education and Aspira of New York, which established bilingual instruction as a legally enforceable federal entitlement for New York City's non-English-speaking Puerto Rican and Latino students. Reyes analyzes the…

In this article, Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe explore the progression of American social policy and its relation to educational reform from President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal to President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The authors assert that this progression has been marked by the federal government's gradual…

Drawing on their legal expertise and their experience working with public school districts, John W. Borkowski and Maree Sneed discuss the controversies surrounding the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). They acknowledge that its principal benefits lie in its recognition of the right of each child to learn and be assessed by…

In recognition of the increased demands facing state education departments in this accountability-focused era, Gail L. Sunderman and Gary Orfield present results from a study on the response of these agencies to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). In this article, Sunderman and Orfield analyze issues of state capacity, compiling data from…

In this article, four urban high school students and their student leadership and social justice class advisor address the question, "What are high school students' perspectives on the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act's (NCLB) definition of a highly qualified teacher?" As the advisor to the course, Garcia challenged her students to examine…