The federal government can and should play a limited but important role in helping the nation address the challenge of  improving the productivity of education spending.

Will states like Nevada, Florida, Massachusetts, and many other places use graduation tests to raise the bar for educational achievement or permit them to become another hollow rite of spring?

Contemporary school reform, from the No Child Left Behind Act to proposals for higher education accountability, places enormous weight on the value of educational testing. Accountability proponents on the left and the right have devoted little time to addressing the shortcomings of testing. Meanwhile, critics have tended to denounce testing...

Diane Ravitch discussed her new book "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

America's public schools were once thought to provide the cornerstone for an informed citizenry, but we are playing fast and loose with our future if we continue to downplay or simply ignore the role civic education plays in making citizens of us all.

School systems across the country have adopted policies, such as Florida’s A+ program, that reward or sanction schools depending on how their students perform on standardized tests. The A+ program assigns schools a grade from A to F, based on how their students score in reading and math. While...

Reid Hoffman’s talk this week at Stanford (podcast and video available here) touched on several themes that collectively seem to comprise the Silicon Valley innovator ethos; most are relevant to healthcare and biopharma, and I agree with all his assertions except one.

(Hoffman, for...