Earlier this week PBS's Frontline broadcast The Education of Michelle Rhee sifted through old Rhee controversies and raised new issues. Was cheating in the schools worse than what was admitted and was that cheating triggered by Rhee's reforms?

Important questions, and worthy of a re-look at Rhee's legacy. Will...

Richard Whitmire is the author of Why Boys Fail

Over the past decade hundreds of articles and scores of book have chronicled the "boy troubles," the odd phenomenon of boys failing in school and men adrift in life.

That is so yesterday's story.

Today's story...

Thanks to a recent Washington Post poll, we know that Washingtonians would like a do-over of the 2010 mayor's race. This time, Adrian Fenty would beat Vincent Gray and win reelection.

Speculation about how things would be different in the District if Fenty had survived leads directly to...

Americans continue to lose faith in their public schools, a Gallup poll reported recently. Less than a third of Americans said they had a "great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in schools.

Why the drop? Parents are unhappy with funding cutbacks that lead to growing class...

The class action lawsuit the ACLU announced last week against both Michigan and a tiny Detroit area school district for failing to educate its own children raises this question: Can schools ever compensate for the ills of poverty?

As poor and minority students increasingly dominate classrooms, the debate about...

Tourists making their way to the Washington Monument last month may have came across 857 neatly arranged student desks -- a symbol of the number of American students who drop out of school every hour of every school day.

The startling array was courtesy of the College Board, which wants...

As a veteran education reporter, I have some advice for parents listening to Mitt Romney and Barack Obama debate this issue: Tune out the phony disagreements such as school vouchers (which are unlikely to make a difference) and instead focus on where the two agree: Launch more great charter schools.

In late March a panel of ten education experts gathered in Washington to nominate four most-improved urban school districts for a national education prize. What should have been a routine review of student data, however, suddenly took a new direction.

First one member on the review panel for the annual...

Unfortunately, this nation lacks a large pool of big-city school chiefs who are truly successful at their jobs. The only upside: the small pool of winners can be easily categorized.

For instance, there's the slow-and-steady type. Chris Steinhauser, who runs the schools in Long Beach, Calif., comes...

At first glance, it would appear there is little to cheer about with America's urban schools. Results from the "Nation's Report card," released Nov. 1 by the U.S. Education Department, were disappointing: no true narrowing of the black/white achievement gaps. High school graduation rates are shockingly low, especially...

Experts who study urban schools districts that are severely challenged by problems of poverty and non-English-speaking students agree that these districts sort out into roughly four groupings. Let's call them pre-basic, basic, intermediate and advanced.

The good news for Dallas is that it has escaped the lowest category, pre-basic....

This week Oregon announced that 6,800 high school seniors were at risk of being denied diplomas because they were unable to pass the state reading test. Here's a fact that wasn't included in the news: 3,900 of those students are males, 2,900 females.

An oddity? Not likely, given that boys...

Something extraordinary played out recently after D.C. schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson announced she was firing roughly 200 teachers for poor performance. Nothing... mostly silence.

In this situation, silence truly is extraordinary. When Michelle Rhee was chancellor of D.C. schools, her teacher firings triggered street demonstrations organized by multiple...

Less than a year ago, as I was finishing a book on Michelle Rhee, the combative former chancellor of schools in Washington, D.C., the time arrived to set up a website for the book. The website designer asked if I wanted to include reader comments. It was a sensible suggestion....

Granted, school reform is not a sporting event, but generals and politicians routinely twin sports and public policy. In that spirit, I offer this suggestion: With last week's greatly downgraded assessment of "cheating" in Washington, D.C. schools, we need a referee to call a strike count on the campaign to...

One of the nation's most compelling education experiments -- a $100 million-plus infusion aimed both at saving Newark school children and building a national school reform model -- appears at risk of early derailment.

Six months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a $100 million donation to help turn around...

Based on recent headlines, this would appear to be a glorious year for education reform. After years of wheel-spinning debates, governors in states such as Florida, Connecticut, Indiana and Ohio are blazing fast tracks trying to turn around troubled school districts.

To ensure the best new teachers are those who...

In a time of multiple wars around the globe and a nuclear meltdown in Japan, you wouldn't expect to see so many front page stories about education policy fights -- but you do. In Florida, Idaho, Minnesota, New York... almost everywhere.

What's happening? And why does former Washington D.C. schools...

The recent announcement by Washington Mayor Vincent Gray that he will keep Kaya Henderson as schools chancellor, after her interim tour, would at first glance suggest that he is sticking with Michelle Rhee's controversial school reforms.

After all, Henderson was Rhee's deputy chancellor, and the two women are good friends....

School reformers like to talk, so they conference a lot. They like writing even more, so they dash off torrents of commentaries on improving schools.

But in all that talking and writing there is one topic that rarely gets raised, especially among white school reformers: race. Just too uncomfortable.

That...