Stubbornly high college remediation rates have revealed a painful equation: High school completion does not equal college readiness. That disconnection has prompted national leaders to focus like never before on figuring out how to ensure that high school graduates are truly ready to succeed in college. In that quest, a California program is often…

States that want newly offered relief from certain provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act are scrambling to satisfy an easily overlooked requirement that they "meaningfully" engage with teachers, unions, parents, and community organizations, and even modify their waiver proposals based on that input. Federal education officials warn…

A mantra in recent years has been to blame the teachers' unions for many of the problems that beset public education. Americans only need look at Wisconsin, where the governor and lawmakers pushed through legislation curtailing the collective bargaining rights of teachers and other public employees. This special report examines the attempts by a…

Spurred both by fiscal realities and momentum from the U.S. Department of Education's agenda for school improvement, local and state education leaders are moving forcefully and quickly to make big changes to districts and schools that have long struggled with low test scores and graduation rates. In Kansas City, Missouri, the school board voted…

In the end, six months of management reforms and the hiring of an experienced urban superintendent failed to keep the Clayton County, Georgia, school district from becoming the nation's first district in nearly four decades to have its accreditation stripped. Last week's decision by the Atlanta-based Southern Association of Colleges and Schools…

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge, chaired from 1995 to 1999 by Barack Obama, is being portrayed by John McCain's campaign as an attempt to push radicalism on schools. Founders of the project say it has been distorted in the presidential campaign. The project undertaken in Chicago as part of a high-profile national initiative reflected, however,…

The community in Rockland County is working together to come up with proposed changes to No Child Left Behind (NCLB). This may be the only community-wide effort in the United States to closely study the lengthy law and recommend detailed changes to it. Under the Rockland County plan, which is discussed in this article, the tests in the…

In this article, the author reports some 3,800 near-simultaneous "house parties" organized throughout Pennsylvania to call on their federal lawmakers to put more money into education. The parties, in which three-quarters of them were organized by teachers such as Jane Dugdale, are the main election-season event of a new coalition of…

Howard High School (South Dakota) is part of the Annenberg Rural Challenge, a privately funded national effort to strengthen rural schools and their communities. Rural Challenge schools create curricula specific to community history and resources, aiming to help students become active knowledgeable citizens. Student projects and the positive and…

In Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Oakland, California and Philadelphia, to name a few cities where it has been active, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has emerged as a major player in K-12 in education issues. Its army of organizers has tackled everything from a lack of stop signs to such vexing issues as teacher…

A member of the Bread Loaf Rural Teacher Network, a national organization of rural teachers interested in school reform, discusses the challenges that rural teachers face in creating criteria for evaluating student performance. Suggests that bringing teachers', students', and parents' voices into a community discussion about how to measure…

Describes how community members from Newburgh, New York, successfully battled against a school board proposal that called for expanding the town's high school to an enrollment of over 3,000 students. Rejects the notion that "bigger is better" and criticizes state funding formulas that create large schools by offering higher reimbursement…

Listening to what students have to say is the most essential to changing the culture of schools. This article discusses the growing national movement is putting students' voices--and their work--front and center in the push to raise expectations and results in schools. This article also presents some examples of young people's active roles in…