One of the most vexing questions about charter schools--when low-performing ones should be shut down--is receiving new attention, amid concerns that lax and inconsistent standards for closing them will undermine the public's confidence in the sector. Over the past few years, a growing number of researchers, policymakers, and charter school backers…

Dozens of schools are slated for aggressive interventions over the next three years under a new, multistate effort that aims to clear hurdles that have hindered previous attempts to improve underperforming schools. Education officials in Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and New York have agreed to partner with Mass Insight…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said that he plans to demand radical steps--such as firing most of a school's staff or converting it to a charter school--as the price of admission in directing $3.5 billion in new school improvement aid to the nation's 5,000 worst-performing schools. In sharp contrast to the current free-flowing nature of…

After years of trying to fix trouble schools one at a time, a number of states are weighing stronger measures for intervening in low-performing school districts. The shift is seen as a response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act. States are turning in a bigger way to district-level strategies, in part because as their own accountability…

This article discusses how state and education officials examined efforts underway to devise systems of support for low-performing schools and districts. Most state education agencies and local school districts are counting on academic coaches and teams of experienced educators to turn around underperforming schools. While those approaches have…

This article reports on the federal education law's focus in 2004, which is the school district performance. More than two years after President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act, the far-reaching federal education law is beginning to bear down on school district performance. After a focus mainly on individual schools, 2004 is the…