Public Education

Less than a week after presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney lambasted the Obama administration for not fighting inertia and special...

A thoughtful look at the education policies of both candidates leaves very little to cheer about for true education reformers.

As a teacher who has students write research papers on the American Civil Rights Movement, I was stunned to find out that I am on the wrong side of the great civil rights issue of our time. It has to be true. Mitt Romney says so.

That's the title of David Kirp's opinion piece in this Sunday's New York Times. I'll begin with his punchline: School desegregation has been proven to...

It's time to stop ignoring poverty and the realities that disadvantaged students face. We must instead address the factors that can and do impede student achievement and well-being.

What ought to be clear to all of us by now is that the institutional structure of schools and school systems is ill-conceived. It is a failure. And this failure is at the root of all other educational failures.

Why are America's high school student so dramatically and devastatingly unprepared to succeed at the highest levels of scholastic achievement? The answer is simple: differentiation.

De-emphasizing failing by fixing scores and allowing functionally illiterate children to advance to the next grade is not the answer to starting to get kids to know how to read, write, and add.

We should not deny the progress we've made thus far. But business leaders learned long ago that slow and steady will not win the race.

Remember pot-luck suppers, when everyone brought a dish or two? What follows is the the equivalent -- although substituting ideas for food. Because t...

If declaring this week "National Charter School Week" was not a deliberate attempt to marginalize those of us who choose to teach in the public school system, then it was exceptionally poor timing.

The crisis in American education is really about how to find and retain and nourish ordinary teachers. They are the ones who do most of the work, have the greatest influence, and are under the greatest stress.

Education is the foundation of our democracy. By seizing on what's working, and recreating those successes from one classroom to the next, we can make it better for everyone.

The quality of public school education almost certainly was damaged. Between May 2007 and May 2011, the number of teachers in the United States decreased by 223,770 -- a decline of almost 6 percent.

We all know that factors related to poverty can limit learning in a number of ways. It's time to take apply the "no excuses" doctrine to systems reforms.

We all know that factors related to poverty can limit learning in a number of ways. It's time to take apply the "no excuses" doctrine to systems reforms.

On March 13th, the Los Angeles Unified School District authorized a worst-case scenario budget that would eliminate education for adults unless other hoped-for means of balancing the budget are achieved.

Let's talk more about supporting teachers to help them stay in the profession and improve their craft.

Acknowledging the real root of the problem -- state school monopolies -- seems like an attack on government. But it is not an attack to observe that government is bad at running schools, anymore than it's an attack on shovels to note that they make lousy Web browsers.

Every child has a right to an education. Yet millions of children are living in countries where that right is systematically violated as a result of armed conflict.

For too long we have allowed politicians to ignore dealing with the real problems of poverty and permitted them to use education as a convenient scapegoat for their negligence.