Once considered a way to help integrate racially divided districts, magnet schools today have been forced to evolve, given increasing pressure to provide more public school choices and legal barriers against using race to determine school enrollment. In a post-desegregation era, many large districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore County…

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…

At a time when many states are adopting controversial measures to launch or expand private school vouchers, Republicans in Michigan are taking a different direction, moving ahead with a plan that would greatly expand the menu of public school choices for students and parents. GOP lawmakers, who control both state legislative chambers, have…

Louisiana is gearing up to open a new front in its push to expand educational choice, essentially creating a marketplace that lets students shop around for publicly funded courses--both online and face-to-face--beyond their schoolhouse doors. More than 30 providers already have stepped forward seeking state approval to take part in the Course…

Jeb Bush left the Florida governor's office in 2007 with a legacy of having brought sweeping changes to his state's education system, through hard-edged policies that gave parents and students more choices and demanded more of schools. Today, that legacy seems poised to grow--and well beyond Florida. In state capitals across the country, numerous…

Five years after the hurricane devastated the region, New Orleans schools emerge changed--and challenged. New Orleans finds itself with a transformed educational system and one that continues to evolve. This new reality comes as the city's public school population stood at about 38,000 as of February, well below the estimated 65,000 before the…

Once a passionate advocate for injecting greater competition and accountability into the U.S. education system, the New York University scholar Diane Ravitch realized three years ago that her views had evolved to a point where she was contradicting herself on a regular basis. Like any good historian, she decided to set the record straight. Her…

During the recently concluded presidential nominating conventions, President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney offered stark choices on K-12 policy while downplaying areas of agreement between their two parties--and the tensions within each party on education issues. In Charlotte, North Carolina, last week, the Democrats put a…

What started as a ripple in the charter community shows signs of becoming a wave as major charter school networks scramble to respond to an unfamiliar phenomenon: moves by their teachers to organize unions. In the first half of this year, teachers formed collective bargaining units in schools run by several of the best-known and highest-profile…

President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been championing charter schools for months, creating what some advocates believe is the most forceful national momentum to expand the largely independent public schools since the first charter opened nearly 20 years ago. That high-profile advocacy is being matched, moreover,…

A report from Education Sector raises questions about the ability of charter schools and charter-management organizations (CMOs) to scale up as dramatically as their supporters might hope. "The extraordinary demands of educating disadvantaged students to higher standards, the challenges of attracting the talent required to do that work, the burden…

In the new educational landscape of New Orleans--where public school choice is a fundamental element--pounding the pavement to drum up students has become a familiar pursuit. Proponents say a central idea of the education system that has emerged since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 is to provide a diverse array of high-quality school options, with…

With the presidential candidates both underscoring their support for entrepreneurial initiatives in education, policy experts are advancing ideas for helping such efforts flourish. In their October 15 debate at Hofstra University, both Senators John McCain of Arizona and Barack Obama of Illinois used questions on education to talk about school…

This article reports how President Bush's new blueprint for the No Child Left Behind Act will create a partisan debate on educational strategies. In its plans for NCLB, the administration said it wants private and charter schools to create competition that would spur improvement in substandard schools. Democrats, however, have their own priorities…

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…