The Ohio Statewide Family Engagement Center (OhSFEC) is implementing a comprehensive, scalable approach to enact state policy for family and school engagement at local levels. Joyce Epstein and Barbara Boone report how OhSFEC's research-based design, implementation, and evaluation of a leadership ladder has enabled state leaders to support…

Today, our schools are more racially segregated than at any time in the last 40 years, mainly because the neighborhoods in which they are located are themselves racially segregated. Yet, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2007 Parents Involved ruling, prohibited school districts from implementing even modest race-conscious desegregation plans. If…

An analysis of school district spending across the U.S. reveals 66 districts where the students face much greater needs than in surrounding districts (i.e., child poverty is more than 20% higher) but where per-pupil spending is less than 90% of the region's average. This not only means that they have less money to spend on children who require…

When troubling attendance data in New Britain, Conn., caught district leaders by surprise, they reconsidered their focus on truancy in the older grades and turned their attention on their elementary schools. With support from local philanthropy and assistance from Attendance Works, the district significantly reduced the incidence of chronic…

American education must prepare students for a world where the opportunities for success require the ability to compete and cooperate on a global scale. The federal government has played a critical role in fostering foreign language and area studies expertise at the post-secondary level. Now is the time for the federal government to engage in a…

Describes the history, size, location, administrative structure, curricula, accreditation, teacher and student characteristics, test administration and results, problems, and future expectations of the school system operated by the United States Department of Defense for 149,000 children of military personnel based outside the United States. (PGD)

Examines the evidence establishing that teaching is a semiprofession and looks at the reasons for this in the conditions of the workplace and in the way these conditions have been set by the state and by local districts. (IRT)

Uses data from a multistate, multidistrict study of education reform conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania to examine the roles of federal, state, and local governments in standards-based reform and how intergovernmental relationships have influenced education-reform policies and…

This article summarizes the effects of NCLB on school districts based on four years of evaluations conducted by the Center on Education Policy as part of the most comprehensive and continuous overview being undertaken of that policy.