The papers have been full of editorials expounding on why the past decade was disastrous for America. There is much to forget and regret about the last decade but it wasn't so bad for education. We should have made more progress than we did, but here's 10 big advances that...

The Department of Education has an assignment that's about five years late: reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, called No Child Left Behind by 43). It's a difficult assignment that requires collaboration of the contentious -- to have good chance of passing Summer 2010, it would require...

1. Arne Duncan is taking advantage of an unbelievably large budget and pushing a tough reform agenda targeting low-income kids and struggling schools. While he'll have his hands full with reauthorization, he has assembled a top notch team.
2. Joanne Weiss leads the mother of all grant program--Race...

The sun set at 4:22pm at latitude 47.3. It will set about a minute later tomorrow. The days are finally getting longer again.

We also turned the corner on the Great Recession; at least the leading indicators look that way. That is little reassurance to the 20% of the...

EdWeek ran a useful commentary by friends from JFF and Johns Hopkins that outlined the range of challenges faced by states in fixing the roughly 2,000 high schools with graduation rates below 60%. Like the authors, I appreciate Secretary Duncan's laser focus on attacking chronic failure--something NCLB attempted to do...

Race to the Top strikes again! The mother of all grant programs has produced more reform than any grant program in history. And the feds haven't spent a dime yet. Three quarters of the states have indicated that they'll be applying for phase 1 grants in January and most have...

"Parent involvement" in education often means "make your kid behave" and "donate to the PTA." Parent involvement is taking on a serious new role in Los Angles. If more than half of the parents of students in struggling demand change, educational options improve--charter schools are opened in their neighborhood, their...

On Monday I attended an education technology conference--a few hundred people reviewing very simple education tools. On Wednesday I attended a military learning technology conference (I/ITSEC)--16,000 people experiencing sophisticated and realistic simulations of flying a fighter, piloting a battleship, and patrolling a village. US education and defense budgets are roughly...

While channel surfing on Thanksgiving morning, I found a school board association meeting where a famous prof was railing on standards and testing with lots of applause from the audience (in a state contemplating delaying college-ready math and science standards until 2015). I agreed with many of his assertions like...

I had dinner with four Republicans last night. They wonder where their party went. It was a chamber of commerce gala, so I probably had dinner with a couple hundred Republicans and a lot of pro-growth Democrats, but I talked politics with four in particular. The current and former state...

There are plenty of theories about how to improve education. Most focus on what appear to be big levers--a point of entry and system intervention that appears to provide some improvement leverage. These theories usually involve 'if-then' statements: 'if we improve this, then other good stuff will happen.' Leading theories...

There are about 10,000 really bad schools in America (about 10%). The majority are elementary schools. We know how to make them better, but it takes political will and capacity to improve them. We know less about turning around bad secondary schools. The one thing wrong with them is everything....

The success of Obama's first term education agenda will be sealed with the announcement of phase 1 Race to the Top winners in March. All indications are that the Obama administration will hold firm on its landscape changing competitive grant program. Only a handful of states will receive grants in...

There's an old saying in business that sometimes you have to go slow to go fast; in other words, you have to build the infrastructure of support in order to create profound change. I think that applies to the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

The...

Half way through a busy travel day, my laptop died. I plugged in the extended life battery and it died. I turned on my Kindle and it froze. So I reached in my bag for a last-minute addition, Evidence, Mary Oliver's nineteenth collection of poems.

Having read most of...

It's only the beginning of the school year, but for high school juniors, the college preparation and selection clock is ticking. For those planning to attend college, the last two years of high school are a busy timeline with a series of complicated milestones: tests, essay, online searches, scholarship applications,...

After spending two days with the best charter school operators in the country, I was impressed by three things:

1. Passion: The room was packed with smart hard working teachers, principals, and network leaders passionate about improving the life choices of low income and minority students. It's energizing to be...

The WSJ reported that "The US government doled out $502 million for a dozen wind and solar energy projects." The big winner was Iberdrola, a Spanish wind giant. Coming in second was Horizon, a subsidiary of a Portuguese firm. Third place went to a UK-owned firm. These grants will likely...

In Washington State the answer is clear--the Washington Education Association. They dragged their feet in hundreds of districts and called strikes in a couple districts last night just to screw up the first day of school.

In Kent, a Seattle suburb, the WEA welcomed a great new superintendent, Dr....

There's a big overlap between the medically uninsured and the educationally underserved. Millions of kids caught in the Venn diagram most often live in or near poverty. Most are children of color. Some are children of undocumented parents.

When compared to other OECD countries, it's embarrassing how poorly we...