School districts have resorted to hiring debt collectors, employing constables, and swapping out standard meals for scaled-back versions to try to coerce parents to pay off school lunch debt that, in recent years, appears to have surged as the result of a faltering economy and better record-keeping. While the average school lunch costs just about…

The author reports on state and independent reviews that cite shortcomings in four urban systems. According to the reviews of those school systems over the past two years, four urban districts--in Boston, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle, Washington--did not provide special help to learn English to all students…

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who says he plans to serve in the Obama Cabinet for the "long haul," has begun sketching out his priorities for the next four years. They include using competitive levers to improve teacher and principal quality and holding the line on initiatives he started during the president's first term. The…

With just months to go until the nation's overhauled K-12 law goes into effect, state policymakers are still scrambling to firm up the infrastructure for their education systems, under the new blueprint laid out in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). They're doing it at a time of political change and policy uncertainty at the national level,…

A document from the U.S. Department of Education intended to clarify schools' responsibility to make sure students with disabilities have access to extracurricular sports has drawn sharply different opinions. Disability-rights advocates welcome the guidance, while critics say federal officials are pushing requirements that could place new…

Over the past two decades or so, a majority of states have implemented policies that link teenagers' driver's licenses to school attendance, academic performance, or behavior, but those requirements are not backed by solid research evidence. Experts trace the start of the trend to 1988, when West Virginia enacted a law linking driving privileges…

As policymakers and education advocates await details on how the Obama administration plans to move forward with its recently unveiled blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the chances of an ESEA renewal this year remain tough to gauge. Although the principles underlying the blueprint have drawn praise in many…

After more than a year of heated campaigning, President Barack Obama remains in the White House, Democrats continue to control the U.S. Senate, and Republicans are still in charge of the House of Representatives--leaving unchanged a political landscape that has paralyzed congressional action on education policy and led the president to flex his…

Hundreds of U.S. schools will supplement fire drills and tornado training next fall with simulations of school shootings. In response to the December shootings by an intruder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, several states have enacted or are considering laws that require more and new types of school safety drills, more…

A state law, which helped Tennessee win Race to the Top money, pushed schools to implement a system that had limited pilot-testing. Education officials in Tennessee are taking flak from teachers and unions for rushing the implementation of the new teacher-evaluation system that will eventually undergird tenure decisions--a move, some worry, that…

As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information? Supporters of typing teacher evaluations to student performance differ over whether individuals' results should be…

The author reports on a long-stalled, bipartisan rewrite of the No Child Left Behind Act approved by the Senate education committee which faces steep political hurdles, including opposition from civil rights and business leaders who see it as a step back on student and school accountability and from Republican lawmakers who say it does not pull…

Even though 34 states and the District of Columbia have No Child Left Behind Act waivers in hand, many of them are still negotiating with the U.S. Department of Education over their teacher evaluation systems--a crucial component if they want to keep their newfound flexibility. More than six months after waiver recipients turned in their…

Given the flexibility to revise their academic goals under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, a vast majority of the states that received federal waivers are setting different expectations for different subgroups of students, an "Education Week" analysis shows. That marks a dramatic shift in policy and philosophy from the original law.…

In the 21 months since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stood on an iconic bridge in Selma, Alabama, and pledged to aggressively combat discrimination in the nation's schools, federal education officials have launched dozens of new probes in school districts and states that reach into civil rights issues that previously received little, if…