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...

Less than three years after NCLB’s enactment, the authors ask whetherits provisions are being conscientiously implemented and appear likely to work as intended.

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.

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.

Join us for a conversation on what Los Angeles mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa has learned from his efforts in Los Angeles, what it takes for mayors to impact public education, and how policymakers and reformers can help drive urban school improvement.

In this genial and challenging overview of endless debates over school reform, Frederick M. Hess shows that even bitter opponents in debates about how to improve schools agree on much more than they realize--and that much of it must change radically.

Easter Monday is a good day to celebrate a resurrection story – in this case, the resurrection of a movement to rescue children trapped in failing public schools.