Education leaders often act lazily, blaming union contracts and federal regulation rather than confronting the problems they have the capacity to solve.

When partnering with outside consultants to turn around a school, schools districts must consider how the work is setting schools up for long-term success.

Even as charter schooling has been at the forefront of education reform efforts, we know remarkably little about how these schools approach this critical dimension of education. What have charter schools done with the opportunity to rethink civic education? Are there lessons to be learned? Are there challenges that impede their ability to teach citizenship?

In the most recent Education Outlook, AEI scholar Rick Hess and Taryn Hochleitner explain how the inflation of college rankings contributes to a false sense of exclusivity and rising tuitions.

Harvard Graduate School of Education's Meira Levinson argues that recovering the civic purposes of public schools will take more than tweaking their curricula. Drawing on political theory, empirical research and her own experience from teaching at an all-black middle school in Atlanta, Levinson calls on schools to remake civic education.

The number of schools ranked highly in guides such as Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is increasing, without any evidence that these schools' instructional quality is also increasing. Applicants and their families should be wary of letting these rankings serve as the main criteria in their college decisions.

Recent economic research suggests that colleges siphon off a significant portion of federal education aid rather than lowering costs to students

Data show a disconnect between the rigor of the math education that high schools claim to be delivering and the quality of the math education that students are actually receiving.