No group had greater hopes for President Obama and his promise of change than the nation's teachers. Poll after poll showed that they despised President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law with its demand for testing, testing, testing. When asked, teachers said that NCLB was driving out everything except...

I have been studying and writing about the New York City public schools since the late 1960s. My first book was a history of the school system. I have followed the changes of the past several years with more than ordinary interest.

When Mayor Bloomberg first proposed to take control...

The great mystery of education policy today is why the Obama administration is embracing the Bush program. I recently wrote in Education Week (June 10) that it is time to kill the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. The overwhelming majority of teachers agree with me. Those who...

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been traveling the country urging mayors to take control of the public schools in their cities. He points to Chicago and New York City as places where mayoral control of schools has led to big improvements.

It is sad to see the Obama...

Of course, no one but Caroline Kennedy knows the real reasons she withdrew from consideration as Senator from New York.

But there are two likely explanations:
1. She realized that Governor David Patterson had decided not to appoint her so she took her name out of the ring...

Fifteen months ago (August 23, 2007), I wrote a post about my dog Molly called "Can This Dog Be Saved?" Molly, a 10-year-old Tibetan terrier, had been diagnosed with lymphoma and had received the most advanced diagnostic treatment that modern veterinary medicine can offer. I was advised by a veterinary...

It has been a cardinal rule with me over many years never to respond to Gerald Bracey's attacks. I know that he will always reply with invective and name-calling, and that is not a mode of argument with which I am comfortable. I usually accept the wisdom of a maxim...

In a recent item on Huffington Post, Gerald Bracey claimed that I should atone for having "suppressed" the Sandia report in 1991. Bracey has achieved a certain notoriety for his insistence over many years that American schools today are better than ever and that anyone who dares to criticize...

Carol Gotbaum died on September 28 in police custody at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She was traveling from New York City, where she lived with her husband Noah and three young children, to Tucson, where she was supposed to enter a month-long rehabilitation program for alcoholism. She missed...

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times printed an adulatory interview of Sir Michael Barber about what needs to happen in American education. Mr. Barber was at one time a close educational advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair. As best I can make out, he advised him...

If you love animals as I do, read on. If not, don't.

In 1998, my dog Molly saved my life. I was stuck at my desk all day, poring through my cluttered financial records in response to an IRS audit, trying to justify every single deposit to my account from...

Imagine this scenario. Two reputable American scholars write a book about how certain ostensibly charitable organizations are financial pass-throughs for radical terrorist groups. The book, which is amply documented, is published by a major academic press in Great Britain. Soon after the book appears, a wealthy Saudi sheik sues...

On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled narrowly in favor of the school in Alaska that suspended a student for holding up a banner that said "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a school-sponsored event. The case has been widely discussed in the press as a test of the First Amendment rights...

Mayor Michael Bloomberg's Department of Education has just approved a plan to pay poor kids to get higher test scores. The city will pay kids if they take tests, pay them if they pass tests and pay them if they get high scores. It will pay them to pass high...

Nicholas Kristof, writing from China, expresses his admiration for Chinese education in a column in the New York Times ("The Educated Giant").

Kristof says that we should "take a page from the Chinese book" to improve our own system of education. As he traveled, he visited elementary and middle...

American students do worse on national tests of American history than any other subject. No one knows why. But it is a fact that more than half of our high school seniors are rated "below basic" in their understanding of American history.

Since the early 1970s, the federal government has...

Ask almost any teacher or principal, and they will tell you that testing has gotten out of hand. The biggest complaint is directed at the federal No Child Left Behind law. The law requires that schools test all students in grades 3 through 8 once per year in reading...

It is really truly hard to keep track of all the studies and reports that appear on what seems to be a daily basis about how to fix the public schools. There have been at least three in the last few days, and the week isn't over yet.

...

I have been reading a number of news items about schools and universities that are taking steps to change students' attitudes towards guns and violence in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre. Of course, every school and university apparently already has a no-guns policy on its campus. So, now...

Somehow the idea got around that states know how to fix failing schools. In New Jersey, when inner-city schools were doing a dismal job, the New Jersey State Education Department took them over. In St. Louis just last month, the state of Missouri took over the St. Louis public...