Stubbornly high college remediation rates have revealed a painful equation: High school completion does not equal college readiness. That disconnection has prompted national leaders to focus like never before on figuring out how to ensure that high school graduates are truly ready to succeed in college. In that quest, a California program is often…

In Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Oakland, California and Philadelphia, to name a few cities where it has been active, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has emerged as a major player in K-12 in education issues. Its army of organizers has tackled everything from a lack of stop signs to such vexing issues as teacher…

Pledging allegiance to the flag--and the "one nation under God" it is said to represent--has been second nature to generations of American schoolchildren. Yet few have had as much reason to reflect on the practice as those in Sacramento, California. Since March 2000, California's Elk Grove school district has faced a legal challenge to…

Faced with a multibillion-dollar budget deficit, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state higher education officials are trying to relieve the burden on the state by redirecting several thousand high school seniors from California's public four-year universities to community colleges for their first two years of school. The California effort emerges…