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.

Under the banner of the American Educational Research Association, roughly 20,000 researchers will convene in Vancouver to report on research that can help fuel student learning and improve schools. If only they knew what wasn't enough.

Sponsored by AEI's Program on American Citizenship, Frederick M. Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies; Meira Levinson, associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and David E. Campbell, associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, have commissioned leading researchers and scholars to explore the issues of citizenship and schooling by looking at domestic and international data, teacher training, and schools and classrooms.

A coherent vision for federal education policy starts not by micromanaging schools, but by focusing on the four functions Washington alone can perform.

For decades, the difference in the test scores of blacks and whites on the SAT, National Assessment of Educational Progress test, Armed Forces Qualification Test, and traditional IQ tests has been a vexed issue for American educational policy. Two of the leading scholars of this controversial topic, James R. Flynn...

The U.S. economy has grown considerably over the past three decades. However, there is a prevailing sentiment that the middle class and the poor have been left behind. Our results show evidence of considerable improvement in material well-being for both the middle class and the poor over the past three decades.

American students are less proficient in their nation's history than any other subject. If creating good citizens who understand the workings of their government is a national goal, schools need to do better.

This past October, the U.S. Senate unanimously confirmed Mark Schneider as the new commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the nation’s primary organization charged with conducting federal education research and collecting statistics on student achievement. The data NCES compiles will shape the direction of education policy in...