Although most students with disabilities (SWDs) receive instruction from general education teachers, little empirical work has investigated whether these students have suitable access to high-quality teachers. We explore the differences in teacher quality experienced by SWDs and students without disabilities (non-SWDs) in the Los Angeles Unified…

Much ink has been spilled debating the role of the intellectual. William Tierney's article "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Role of the Intellectual in Eliminating Poverty" in the August/September 2013 issue of "Educational Researcher" adds to this literature. In his article, Tierney presents recommendations to the education…

The relatively low status of teaching as a profession is often given as a factor contributing to the difficulty of recruiting teachers, the middling performance of American students on international assessments, and the well-documented decline in the relative academic ability of teachers through the 1990s. Since the turn of the 21st century,…

Building on the premise that closing achievement gaps is an economic imperative both to regain international educational supremacy and to maintain global economic competitiveness, I ask whether it is possible to rewrite the social contract so that education is a fundamental right--a statutory guarantee--that is both uniform across states and…

Critiques Hirsh's book, "The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them," which suggests that progressive education is rampant in today's school, and all students should learn important subject matter content that should be appropriately sequenced and uniformly paced, with achievement objectively measured. Critiques Hirsh's minimization…

Reviews "The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America's First Voucher Program" (John Witte), which examines the Milwaukee Parent Choice Program (MPCP) and describes school voucher politics that have focused significant national attention on the MPCP since its inception. Suggests that the book understates the inadequacies of…

The accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 place high-poverty schools and racially diverse schools at a disadvantage because they rely on mean proficiency scores and require all subgroups to meet the same goals for accountability. In this article, student achievement data from six states are used to highlight…