Even with nearly 50 schools shutting down at the end of this month, Chicago education officials have been barreling ahead with plans to groom a large crop of high-performing principals that they say represents the most ambitious effort the city has undertaken to upgrade its school leadership ranks. The goal, said Chicago schools CEO Barbara…

Chicago teachers voted last week to suspend a 7-day-old strike, sending some 350,000 students back to the classroom and paving the way for the teaching force to vote on a tentative contract. But for many in the Windy City, the contract has raised another potentially tall hurdle: how the cash-strapped district will manage to pay for it. District…

The author reports the results of a study on the effectiveness of the Teacher Advancement Program in Chicago that contains performance-pay model pushed by the U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan. The study by Mathematica Policy Research finds that student test scores were no better for schools following the national Teacher Advancement Program…

This article reports on the increasing attempts to identify what have been dubbed high-flying schools and figure out what makes them tick to bring all students to higher levels of achievement. A free Web site, launched by the New York City-based Standard & Poor's, began providing a tool that enables users to identify schools that do better…

Evidence is mounting that federal employees and their agents may have directed or even pressured states to choose specific assessments, consultants, and the criteria for evaluating core reading programs as conditions for getting funding under the Reading First initiative, possibly in violation of federal law. "Education Week" found such…