As his district's director of equity and strategic engagement, Shomari Jones often hears the stories of the racism Black students and their families experience in schools. As a Black man representing a culturally white district, he is continually reminded of how the suffering of the past has persisted into the present. Jones and Paul Sutton…

Can the nation's schools meet today's challenge of providing all students with the skills they will need to thrive in the rapidly changing economy and society of the 21st century? The authors point out in this article that a large percentage of children, overwhelmingly from low-income families, end their formal schooling without the…

Reformers hope that by unbundling schools--taking apart the current structures and routines and putting them together in new ways--we can create better schools. But there is no guarantee that it would improve schools in three areas that we know matter: coherence and infrastructure, the instructional core, and political accountability. However,…

Current value-added models for teacher accountability are better than models based only on student achievement, but they have their weakness. They are subject to systematic and random error, as are all measures, and there are concerns about the tests used for the measurements. However, value-added models are better than the alternatives at the…