Elaine Weiss

At a recent event in New York City, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University, bemoaned the political maneuvering and bickering over details that has come to dominate education policy discussions. In all the arguing over whether to open more charter schools or publicize teacher test scores, he correctly...

It's hard to imagine public officials for whom child poverty and concentrated child poverty, poses a clearer obstacle than for superintendents of large urban school districts. A team of researchers in Chicago found that, in some of the city's most troubled schools, as many as one in four...

In their recent study of the impact of high-"Value-Added" teachers, Raj Chetty and his colleagues find that a student who was able to substitute an extremely weak teacher -- one who ranked in the bottom 5% of the distribution of all teachers -- for one substantially better, would...

If they weren't so damaging to children, congressional leaders' explanations for their policy decisions that cater to big money interests at those children's expense would be downright funny. The most recent of these hijinks is the insistence that pizza and French fries count as school lunch vegetables, in place of...