White voters don’t like paying for the education of minority schoolchildren, or so we learn from a New York Times article this week that looked at places in New York where school budgets were voted down this year. The article’s author, Sam Roberts, found that in places where the majority of voters were white and the majority of [...]

Two years of cuts in state support saddled the Natomas Unified School District in Sacramento, Calif. this spring with what school board president B. Teri Burns said were “horribly painful” choices: fewer teachers and larger classes, or keeping teachers but cutting athletics, counseling, after-school programs and other services.  Like many school districts across the nation, [...]

The U.S. Department of Education has awarded nine states and the District of Columbia a total of $3.3 billion for a variety of education reforms in the second round of the Race to the Top competition. The winners were chosen from 19 finalists. Applications were judged on a 500-point scale. Click on the winning states to see [...]

What does it take to win millions of federal dollars to finance state education reforms? Including some magical words certainly can’t hurt. A look at the finalists’ applications from the second round of Race to the Top reveals that winners hit on key education buzzwords more frequently than losers did. One exception is that losers [...]

Race to the Top winners for round two were announced this morning by the U.S. Department of Education. The ten winners were Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C. There were many more surprises today than in the annoucement of finalists on July 27th. For those who [...]

Parents wanting to get their kids into a Los Angeles elementary school they think is the best enter a lottery and pray, cross their fingers and do whatever else they can to increase their chances. But, in terms of gains in student achievement, some of the district’s most popular schools are not the most effective. [...]

A quarter-century ago, the nation was transfixed by the question, Where’s the beef? Now, the question we should be asking ourselves about our nation’s schools is, Where’s the rigor? Or, Where’s the academic beef? Concerns about the lack of rigor in U.S. schools were renewed yesterday, when new data were published on how prepared — [...]

If April showers bring May flowers, what does July heat bring? Not August meat. August is instead open season on college rankings — which are, of course, mostly fluff. The idea that the overall quality of U.S. colleges and universities can be reduced to a single number, which allows institutions to be rank-ordered first to last, is hugely [...]