A broad range of factors go into weighing how well the nation's schools are living up to their responsibility to ensure that students are on track academically and prepared to take their place in a complex, ever-changing society. This third and final installment of "Quality Counts 2018" digs deeply into test scores, high school…

At a time when many teenagers are consumed by such activities as text-messaging, blogging, and social networking, more middle and high school students than in the past have mastered the formal "basic" writing skills needed to express ideas or share information, national assessment results released last week show. But just small proportions--33…

Elementary school students have a stronger grasp of U.S. history, and what it means to be a knowledgeable citizen, than they did a few years ago, new test results suggest. Part of the reason they are better informed about history and citizenship, some argue, is that they are better readers. That was the view put forward by U.S. Secretary of…

The presumed November match-up produced by the long presidential-primary season offers contrasting approaches to K-12 policy, along with some common ground on the basics of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Senator John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, his Democratic counterpart, both…

This article reports on Ontario's way of school improvement which focuses less on test-score results and more on engaging teachers and principals. Like the United States, the Canadian province of Ontario has committed itself to reaching key numeric targets: at least 75 percent of 6th graders able to read, write, and do mathematics at the…

Scores on state tests have increased consistently and significantly in the five years since the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) became law, and there's some evidence that gains that started in the 1990s accelerated after the law's enactment, a new report concludes. The authors of the report, which was set for release this week, are quick to say…

Educators who specialize in teaching English-language learners agree that the 4-year-old No Child Left Behind Act has brought unprecedented attention to those students by requiring schools to isolate test-score data for them. They disagree, though, on whether changes in instruction spurred by the law have been positive or negative overall. Such…

Schools taking part in the federal Reading First program are showing significant progress in boosting students' reading fluency and comprehension, according to state-reported data compiled and released by the U.S. Department of Education last week. In releasing for the first time detailed, multiyear data on how Reading First schools are performing…

Not only did many industrialized countries outperform the United States in science on a recent international exam, but American students' academic achievement was also more likely to be affected by their wealth or poverty and family background than was their peers' in higher-scoring nations. That was one of several sobering findings for the United…

President Bush says that the No Child Left Behind Act is working, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable. The data Mr. Bush cited are from just the "long-term…