When Arthur Levine, then the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, wrote a scathing report in 2005 on the preparation of American school leaders, the one institution he singled out as a "promising model" was not even in the United States. This article describes England's National College for School Leadership. Created by…

With the federal No Child Left Behind Act underscoring the wide variation in what states demand of their students, people on both sides of the political aisle are again making the case for national standards, curricula, and tests. It wasn't so long ago--during the Clinton and George H.W. Bush administrations--that similar proposals went down in…

The number of schools that have failed to make "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act is proving to be a moving target, as states clean up erroneous data and grant appeals to schools that challenge the unwanted label. Under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that aims to raise students academic…

This article discusses the increasing number of schools that met all of their 2004 annual achievement targets under U.S. federal law. Over half the states released at least preliminary lists of the number of schools that had made adequate yearly progress under the No Child Left Behind Act, based on 2003-04 test data. In general, the percentage of…

The U.S. Department of Education has notified 10 states that it intends to withhold a portion of their state administrative funds under the Title I program for failing to comply fully with the testing provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act by the end of the 2005-06 school year. Those funds would instead be diverted directly to school…

The No Child Left Behind Act is slated to be reauthorized in 2007, and both President Bush and the leaders of the incoming Democratic-controlled Congress have signaled their interest in keeping renewal of the law on schedule. Many observers expect the debate over renewing the law--which itself was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary…

The proportion of public schools' meeting their prescribed achievement targets under the No Child Left Behind Act appears to have fallen slightly in the 2005-06 school year, while the percent classified under the law as needing improvement increased. The trends bear out earlier predictions that schools would find it increasingly hard to show…