Data for three Peabody achievement tests and for the Peabody picture vocabulary test administered to children of women in the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth show that the black–white difference did not diminish for this sample of children born from the mid-1970s through the mid-1990s.

Richard Rodriguez is an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco and is a contributing editor for Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, and the Sunday "Opinion" section of the Los Angeles Times. He appears regularly as an essayist on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and...

Teachers are the most important school-level factor in student success—but as any parent knows, all teachers are not created equal. Reforms to the current quite cursory teacher evaluation system, if done well, have the potential to remove the worst-performing teachers and, even more important, to assist the majority in improving their craft.

Thomas P. Miller reviews Porter and Teisberg's Redefining Health Care.

Testimony on the elimination of policy separating banking and commerce.

Regulating securities firms the way we regulate banks, and giving them routine access to the Fed's discount window, makes no practical or policy sense.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation should permit its moratorium on nonfinancial firms acquiring ILC charters to expire as planned on January 31.

The Bush administration's signature No Child Left Behind Act dramatically expanded the federal role in education.