This is the seventh annual report required by Act 150. It provides information on how schools have implemented the law and the extent to which students have participated, focusing chiefly on the current school year. In January 2005, the department provided qualitative findings from a study done by UVM researchers and offered additional findings…

Richard Murnane observes that the American ideal of equality of educational opportunity has for years been more the rhetoric than the reality of the nation's political life. Children living in poverty, he notes, tend to be concentrated in low-performing schools staffed by ill-equipped teachers. They are likely to leave school without the skills…