For all the national and even international debate about the state of American education, public schooling in the U.S. is still a local matter--and the school district remains its hub. As administrators know, there's nothing abstract about the process of getting millions of students into their seats, assuring they receive the instruction they're…

Educators from the United States flock to Edmonton, Alberta, a district in Canada where schools control 80% of the district's total budget. Education leaders from Chicago, Colorado, Hawaii, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Oakland, California, and the District of Columbia have all flocked to learn about Edmonton's experience with site-based management of…

This paper is Part 2 of a three-part series examining the boom in the construction and renovation of K-12 schools and the continuing challenges that communities face in getting the facilities their students and educators need. With affordable land for new schools becoming scarce, urban and suburban districts are finding new ways to play the real…

This article presents the details of a conference discussing issues on NCLB implementation. The conference was based on a set of papers that included reviews of NCLB implementation in California, Colorado, Michigan, and New Jersey, as well as in three rural Kentucky districts and 36 big-city districts nationwide. Those analyses found that states…

In this article, the author discusses a partnership between Baylor University and the Waco public schools that embeds every teacher-candidate--from the freshman year on--into the K-12 system. To test whether professional-development schools, modeled after teaching hospitals, can be scaled up so that all of a college's teaching candidates--not just…