More states are closing failing charter schools, but shuttling students back to mediocre public schools could be doing the system’s most vulnerable children more harm than good.

I remember the moment I stopped resenting the deduction in my paychecks that went to my union. It took me three years, and happened suddenly. Halfway through my third year of teaching music, in 2007, administrators in my St. Louis district decided to cut student time in the arts by 64 percent at the middle-school [...]

CHICAGO – On a recent Friday morning, 15-year-old Jerod Franklin stared at his hands as he labored to type up memories of the first time he grilled steak. Next to him, classmate Brittany Levy tackled a piece about a trip to the hospital. The Bronzeville Scholastic Institute ninth-graders were working on writing assignments in the [...]

A report to be released Thursday by a national research group on teacher quality suggests the Miami-Dade school district is not doing enough to get rid of underperforming teachers.

In the age of accountability, measuring teacher effectiveness has become king. But it’s not enough merely to measure effectiveness, according to many leading thinkers and policymakers; personnel decisions—from pay and promotions to layoffs and outright firings—should be based on teacher-effectiveness data, they say. The Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition brought renewed attention to [...]

Americans learn a bit more every year about the strengths and shortcomings of the education systems in other countries, thanks to a steady raft of international test data, academic scholarship, and analysis arriving from home and abroad. Today, elected officials of all political stripes and advocates for a range of school policies scrutinize the results [...]

In the sunlit library at Jorge Prieto Elementary on Chicago’s’ northwest side, an experiment is under way. A provisional classroom has been set up. A white board sits at the front of the room, and 20 eighth-graders are seated at library tables. Math teacher Michael Hock is giving a lesson about the distributive property. Scattered [...]

KENT, Ohio—As finals approached, nearly 240 students in a computer lab worked through basic algebra problems at Kent State University, where they and more than 3,200 of their classmates had been deemed unprepared for college-level math. They struggled to solve for x in equations like 3x + 1 = 7—a skill students are meant to [...]