Are there limits to federal involvement in K-12 education? What can the government really do well to improve schooling? Should it be involved at all? In this presidential election year, these and other educational hot topics are examined in Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit: Lessons From a Half-Century of Federal Efforts to Improve America’s Schools

Over the past fifty years, what have we learned about the nature of a smart, sensible federal role in K-12 schooling?

This book explores the purposes of federal student loans, how well traditional arrangements work, and how innovations might offer guidance for rethinking the design of financial aid.

Students and families can finance higher education in three ways: grants, government-backed loans, or private loans. Contemporary research and debate typically focus on grants and federally supported loans. Meanwhile, despite its explosive growth, the private loan market remains minimally researched and poorly understood. This made sense a decade ago, when...

Today, increasing attention is being paid to the importance and rigor of education research, which includes data collection and case studies of teaching practices, student achievement, and education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act’s call for interventions based on “scientifically based research,” the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002,...

What can be done to address the phenomenon that had been mostly invisible for a decade--boys falling behind girls in school?