When partnering with outside consultants to turn around a school, schools districts must consider how the work is setting schools up for long-term success.

At the heart of the debate over renewing No Child Left Behind, the nation’s education reform act which is overdue for reauthorization, is the question: what is the role of the federal government in K-12 education? Though the law was initiated and signed by a Republican president, presidential candidates like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, who once supported it, now talk about getting the federal government out of education. Democratic reformers, meanwhile, insist that the federal government has a role in telling states how to identify, punish and fix low-performing schools — despite little evidence that Washington has been good at any of these tasks.  Over the last decade, AEI Education has been exploring these concerns.

Armed with better data, the theory goes, students and parents will vote with their wallets, putting pressure on low-performing colleges to improve while avoiding direct government intervention.  But these provisions are not working nearly as well as intended.

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An exclusive focus on low-achieving students ignores the fact that students have different needs. Thus, our would-be reformers have left advanced students to fend for themselves.

Prospective college students lack basic information about college costs and quality--and how they vary across institutions--on which to base their investment decisions. This lack of information handicaps the ability of students to be the savvy consumers that a well-functioning market requires, freeing poor-performing institutions to operate at will.

Education leaders often act lazily, blaming union contracts and federal regulation rather than confronting the problems they have the capacity to solve.

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.