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

At the heart of the debate over renewing No Child Left Behind, the nation’s education reform act which is overdue for reauthorization, is the question: what is the role of the federal government in K-12 education? Though the law was initiated and signed by a Republican president, presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, who once supported it, now talk about getting the federal government out of education. Democratic reformers, meanwhile, insist that the federal government has a role in telling states how to identify, punish and fix low-performing schools — despite little evidence that Washington has been good at any of these tasks.  Over the last decade, AEI Education has been exploring these concerns.

It might be passé to mock the ever-obliging humanities departments in our universities and colleges, but there’s so much . . . richness in the soil underneath Faber College’s motto that one can’t help taking les clercs to task at least once a quarter.

Where Obama went wrong on education – and what Romney needs to say

Not all professors are radicals and not all students are timewasters.Many still seek knowledge, if not wisdom, but gap between the ideal and the reality has seemingly never been greater.

Educators lack the data necessary to pinpoint concerns and successes in schools, but through six key steps, data-driven management in education could become a reality, and the data, if collected and analyzed correctly, could be used to foster improvements in education.