The 2013 edition of "Diplomas Count," entitled "Second Chances: Turning Dropouts into Graduates," examines dropout recovery and innovative strategies for returning to the educational fold the 1 million students who leave school without a diploma each year. "Education Week's" journalists investigate interventions that…

Technology-based forces of "disruptive innovation" are gathering around public education and will overhaul the way K-12 students learn--with potentially dramatic consequences for established public schools, according to an upcoming book that draws parallels to disruptions in other industries. In his "Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation…

A company that runs one of the nation's largest networks of online schools recently decided to discontinue a program that arranged for high school teachers in the United States to send their students' English essays to India for evaluations by reviewers there. The existence of the program by Herndon, Virginia-based K12 Inc. is an example of the…

This article reports how the 10 "pilot" schools conceived by the Boston district in 1994 are seeing more students through graduation than regular high schools in the area. Conceived a decade ago as the district's response to charter schools, pilot schools have won praise from educators, business leaders, and community groups for…

After nearly eight months on the job, Superintendent David L. Brewer III has rolled out his strategy for improving student achievement in the 708,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). Three new, reform-minded members also have been sworn in on the school board. But so far, the momentum for improving high schools in the nation's…

In 2004, High Tech High, a charter school chain based in San Diego, California, became the state's first charter-management organization (CMO) to gain state approval to operate its own teacher-credentialing program. It is not stopping there. In August, it will cut the ribbon on the High Tech High graduate school of education, which appears to be…

As students have returned to Alice M. Harte Elementary School, they have found their old school far from the way they left it on the last school day before Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the city. The building may look much the same as it did on August 26, 2006 but half the faces here are new--from principals to teachers to students. The…

A major strand in the current national push to improve secondary education is the movement to scale down schools into smaller, more personalized units, especially for students facing the greatest obstacles to success. Hundreds of small schools and learning communities have cropped up in recent years, famously helped along by the Bill & Melinda…

Even before a single student had signed up for High Tech High School, the founders of the new charter school on San Diego Bay knew they did not want that first school to be their last. They wanted to affect more children. To that end, Larry G. Rosenstock, the founding principal of the highly regarded 5-year-old school, and other leaders of the…

Mr. Barr, a Democratic political organizer who turned charter school mogul, has waged a contentious, two-year campaign to persuade leaders in the nation's second-largest school system to let him run one or more troubled high schools. Mr. Barr, with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, set to assume some control of the district on Jan. 1, 2007, where he may…

It is not unusual to hear students at the Cesar Chavez Learning Center say that if they were not able to go to this kind of school, they would have given up on formal education a long time ago. Housed in a strip mall a mile and a half from the U.S.-Mexican border, the Chavez center allows students to attend school for a half day--morning or…