Contributors to this book encourage legislators to act and embrace its muscular, hardy recommendations.

This book is a sobering and important look at the nation's basic federal education law governing K-12 schools.

Congress and the Bush administration are wrestling with proposals to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). While debate has focused on the provisions regarding testing, teacher quality, and identifying schools in need of improvement, little attention has been paid to the law’s ambitious cascade of remedies and sanctions...

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has fundamentally reshaped debates about American schooling by mandating that students in each district school make “adequate yearly progress.” Schools and districts that fail to improve are subjected to a five-year “cascade” of remedies and sanctions. These detailed prescriptions are intended to force...

An intriguing experiment is afoot in some of the nation’s struggling public schools. New “Parent Trigger” laws passed in California and on the agenda in New York, Ohio, Colorado, and Chicago, allow parents of chronically failing schools to unseat the schools’ leadership and staff. But the initiative has pitfalls.

After two years of sitting on the Korea FTA, the administration managed to renegotiate in such a way as to slow liberalization. The TPP holds enormous promise, but no end line is in sight, and the administration has not even sought negotiating authority yet. Where the administration has moved on trade, it has usually been in response to strong pressure from Congress.

As the trade agenda returns to the headlines, it is important to remember that there is both good news and bad news in the world of U.S. trade. And the shorthand for the division between the two is the difference between policy and politics.