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…

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…

California legislators swiftly passed a budget bill last week aimed at sheltering school busing dollars from a midyear budget cut many districts and advocates said particularly hurt rural school systems, along with urban districts with desegregation plans. While the measure, which Gov. Jerry Brown was expected to sign into law, would restore $248…

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…

Over the next few weeks, dozens of schools will open across New Orleans for the second full academic year since Hurricane Katrina. As many as 33,000 children are expected to report to one of the campuses in the city's patchwork of charter and traditional public schools. Unlike last fall--when many schools opened without textbooks, functioning…

This article reports the plan of the U.S. Department of Education to expand a pilot initiative that would flip the order of key consequences for schools' low academic performance under the No Child Left Behind Act. Building on an initiative piloted in Virginia for school year 2006-2007, participating districts could offer a choice of supplemental…

Usually parents choose the schools their children attend, but Kentucky's Jefferson County district's "managed choice" plan has compulsory elements, too. Students are classified by the district as either black or "other," which encompasses white, Asian, and Latino students. A school may not enroll a new student if doing so would…