Obama's 2011 Elementary and Secondary Education Act Flexibility plan grants certain states waivers from No Child Left Behind accountability requirements if they agree to a series of preset conditions, but the waiver plan poses several notable risks.

The observations and experiences of interviewees who have worked in both for-profit and not-for-profit higher education suggest that traditional colleges and universities will be badly mistaken if they assume that the travails of for-profits today mean that useful lessons cannot be drawn from their successes to date—and those likely to occur in the future.

Instead of involving the private sector, education policymakers have actually created policy and funding barriers that skew support to nonprofits and prevent for-profits from participating in programs aimed at improving teaching or learning.

The enormous costs and burdens of outmoded facilities arrangements represent an immense opportunity for the nation's school systems.

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 traditional Left-Right ideological continuum fails to capture the ways policymakers and the public confront questions about for-profit involvement in education.

Given the tight fiscal environment, it is critical that policymakers have a solid grasp on how to think about college costs and accountability so that they will be prepared to make important decisions about budget cuts and higher education policy in the years ahead.

State education agencies and their chiefs must transform the SEA into an agent of change that can assist districts in the crucial task of remaking our public schools to meet the needs of our children in the 21st century.