Nebraska lawmakers the week of April 10, 2006 approved a hotly debated bill to break up the Omaha Public Schools--largely along racial and ethnic lines--under a plan that critics say amounts to state-sanctioned segregation and that likely will face a legal challenge. Passed April 13, 2006 in the last hours of the legislative session and signed the…

Following the approval of legislation that would divide the city's public school system into racially and ethnically distinct districts, many Omaha community members and leaders mid-April 2006 expressed a mix of outrage, confusion, and disbelief. In this article, the author discusses the measure that calls for dividing any school system in the…

The backlash against the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was raised to a new level when Connecticut's attorney general announced that his state plans to sue the U.S. Department of Education over the testing mandates in the sweeping federal law. In announcing his intentions, Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he was inviting other states to…

When students put down their pencils at the end of Connecticut's testing each year, another intensive process begins. Hundreds of trained evaluators work day and night for about a month to score the written responses. Although expensive, the use of open-ended questions drives the kind of instruction that state leaders say they want in their…

This article reports results showing that the Independence, Missori school district failed to meet almost every one of its improvement goals under the No Child Left Behind Act. The state accreditation system stresses improvement over past scores, while the federal law demands specified amounts of annual progress toward the ultimate goal of 100…