When Candice McQueen learned last fall that a controversial statistical analysis had declared her teacher-training program relatively weak in the area of social studies, she wasn’t surprised. Earlier feedback, including postgraduation surveys, had suggested that the college of education at Nashville’s Lipscomb University needed to bolster its social studies training, said McQueen, the college’s dean. [...]

Gerald Carlson’s heart sank when he received word several years ago that a controversial statistical analysis had decreed his program one of Louisiana’s weakest in preparing educators to teach English language arts. “We thought we had a good program,” said Carlson, dean of the education school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “We were [...]

For better or for worse, today’s school superintendents have become CEOs. Corporate principles and the lexicon of business are pervasive throughout American schools. Teachers work to shore up a bottom line defined by test scores. And if numbers fail to improve, the district drops the school from its portfolio. In some communities, the record numbers [...]

One spring afternoon, O. Perry Walker High School Principal Mary Laurie made her way to the school’s courtyard, where a lone student sat at a picnic table with a large stack of papers in front of him and a frustrated look on his face. Laurie recognized the student as a shy senior with one of the highest GPAs in his class. The documents, it turned out, were all from Tuskegee University.

JACKSON, Miss. — When state officials here tried last year to recruit a for-profit company to manage schools in rural Tate County, the community outcry was swift. Concerned residents spoke out in the media, argued their case to lawmakers and circulated a petition against the “privatization” of Tate County Schools. Patricia Johnson, whose son attends [...]

Mississippi ranked 48th — ahead of only Idaho, Nevada, and South Dakota — in an annual ranking of states’ educational performance and policy. Quality Counts 2013, released by the weekly newspaper Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, grades states on a variety of indicators, including school spending, overall student performance, and [...]

Mississippi lawmaker Kenneth Wayne Jones, a Democrat, briefly became a political pariah last winter when he voted in favor of a proposal to expand charter schools in his state. He was the only African-American state senator to support the bill, which most members of Mississippi’s legislative Black Caucus disavowed. Jones liked the idea of expanded [...]

It took LaToysha Brown 13 years to realize how little interaction she had with white peers in her Mississippi Delta town: not at church, not at school, not at anywhere. The realization dawned when she was in the seventh grade, studying the civil rights movement at an after-school program called the Sunflower County Freedom Project. [...]

Charter schools now enroll more than 20 percent of public school children in 25 school districts across the country, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which tracks charter school growth annually. Overall, charters enrolled more than two million students in 41 states and the District of Columbia during [...]

MCCOMB, Miss. — With Mississippi officials steadfastly refusing to fund public pre-kindergarten at a statewide level, local leaders across the state have taken matters into their own hands. From the Gulf Coast to the Delta, school district leaders are cobbling together resources, partnering with community organizations and devising creative solutions to ensure their youngest students [...]