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...

With leading papers all reporting on recovery, can we assume the crisis is over? Stock portfolios may be on the mend, but folks that rely on property tax--states, counties, cities, and schools--will feel the impact of reset values and defaults for years to come.

Department of Education grants of...

NPR's All Things Considered is running a series called "Friday Night Lives". I'm using it as an excuse for my one and only back to school homage and reflection on high school sports -- good and bad.

Two-a-days marked more than the end of summer, they were an incredibly...

In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition -- and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but...

Team Obama is winning on education and losing on health. One difference between the health care food fight and the coherent education agenda is a mostly unified eight-year policy push by the new money foundations.

The debacle we're watching in health care is, in part, sponsored by competing foundations....

After 30 years of reading a book a week, I've only read a handful in the last two years -- none in print format. I'm reading more than ever, just not the hardbound books that line my library. It's a case study of but one part of a trend.

Watching the Sunday morning arguments about health reform, I was struck by how fortunate we are that Obama's team snuck education reform into the stimulus bill. While most of the $100 billion for education just partially backfills cuts, it forced states to acknowledge the Department of Education's priorities of...

This week President Obama called for the creation of the American Graduation Initiative, a $12 billion effort to encourage degree completion, especially Associate degrees and certificates. America has slipped in high school and college completion rates to the middle of the OECD pack. David Brooks explained why we need to...

Last night over dinner, a friend asked me what I thought schools would look like that do a good job fostering innovation.

Five innovator attributes come to mind:

Skilled: Innovators almost universally have strong analytical reasoning and communication skills. They can dissect a problem and help others see it...