Preparing students to enter the workforce and attracting and retaining good teachers are Americans' top educational priorities for the next administration in Washington, regardless of who wins the upcoming presidential election, the 2024 PDK Poll finds. While eight in 10 or more Americans pick those two items as priorities, other policy priorities…

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…

Big corporations and food service companies are making millions of dollars from public school meal programs, often to the detriment of students' health. Jennifer Gaddis explains how government policies and funding shortfalls have affected what is served is school cafeterias. Common cost-cutting measures include serving cheap and easy-to-prepare…

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…

Since its founding in 1979, one of the U.S. Department of Education's primary missions has been to promote civil debate about the condition of our schools and colleges. Our past secretaries of education -- 12 of them in all -- have recognized that they have important rhetorical responsibilities, not only to call attention to the urgent educational…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was designed to remedy the wrongs of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Yet Andrew Saultz, Jack Schneider, and Karalyn McGovern explain that, so far, it has failed to fundamentally alter how the federal government interacts with schools. They discuss the need for federal authority over issues of equity in education…

The 2020 PDK Poll of the Public's Attitude Toward the Public Schools finds that more than half of adults consider public education highly important in their choice for president. And regardless of political party, most Americans agree that the administration in Washington should focus on attracting and retaining good teachers to the profession and…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), passed in 2015, succeeded in weakening the least popular parts of the No Child Left Behind act. But, argues Jack Jennings, it's a purely reactive piece of legislation, offering no positive vision for the federal government's role in addressing K-12 education's most urgent problems. ESSA is still young, he…

"Kappan"'s editor talks with Michigan State University's Sarah Reckhow about her research into the ways wealthy private philanthropies have influenced K-12 education in recent years. As Reckhow explains, not only have Gates, Broad, Walton, and other big foundations spent unprecedented amounts of money to support their favored reform…

In 2016, the federal government proposed and adopted the Every Student Succeeds Act, which retracted the federal government's prior control over states' teacher evaluation systems, permitting more local control. Kevin Close, Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, and Clarin Collins collected information from states to determine the degree to which states were…

As the Every Student Succeeds Act is returning authority over teacher evaluation policies back to the states, policy makers at the state level have the opportunity to revise their policies. But who will they listen to when it comes to potential reforms? The author surveyed education policy makers to determine to what degree teachers, education…

Under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), federal education mandates will be decreasing, which means states will have more flexibility and authority than they've had in decades. State education agency (SEA) leaders are confronting great change and great opportunity as many agencies move away from a focus on compliance with federal regulations,…

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…

The author draws on his extensive experience helping lead Congress's education efforts and later a highly respected education research concern to propose a new approach to federal education policy that expands and transforms the federal role. This new approach would significantly expand federal aid to schools that is not restricted to particular…