This article reports that special interest groups opposed to charter schools and high-stakes testing have hijacked Massachusetts's once-independent board of education and stand poised to water down the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests and the accountability system they support. President Barack Obama and Massachusetts…

This report summarizes an analysis of Fall 2007 Austin ISD students who took the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school choice option in the past four years and how these students performed on the Texas state assessment (TAKS) in reading/English language arts and mathematics in the year prior to and after they took the school choice option.

This report presents trends on the implementation of Title I parental choice options from the National Longitudinal Study of No Child Left Behind (NLS-NCLB) and the Study of State Implementation of Accountability and Teacher Quality Under No Child Left Behind (SSI-NCLB). The report uses data from state-level interviews; surveys of a nationally…

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act guarantees a child qualified as homeless the right to attend one of two schools: the school of origin or the local attendance area school. This brief explains the relevant legal provisions and provides a framework to assist in the decision-making process.

George W. Bush entered the White House determined to change federal education policy. In his first year as the president, Bush forged a bipartisan consensus around the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which he signed into law on January 8, 2002. For the first time, states receiving federal K-12 education funding would be required to hold districts…

Given the potential consequences of test results, it is important that policy makers, educators, and parents understand the empirical base underlying the use and validity of assessments for measuring the academic progress of English Learners (Abedi, Hofstetter, & Lord, 2004). In order to understand how the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) school…

This article reviews educational initiatives of state and federal government that were designed to remedy the effects of racial segregation on Black public school students in the United States after the famous "Brown v. Board of Education" decisions. Several policy and legal initiatives are reviewed, including school desegregation,…

There continues to be a significant debate as to the most effective means of providing North Carolina's children with the best possible education. The one point upon which a great majority agree is that, despite substantial increases in funding, public education is not meeting the needs of a large proportion of the state's students. This paper…

Supports tuition tax credits insofar as they enhance academic excellence and strengthen our society. (JOW)

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the single most influential piece of federal education legislation in American history, and Hess and Petrilli provide a concise yet comprehensive look at this important and controversial act. Signed into law in 2002, NCLB seeks to ensure that all American students are proficient in math, reading, and science by 2014.…

This report presents findings about the relationship between participation in the Title I school choice and supplemental educational services options and student achievement from the National Longitudinal Study of "No Child Left Behind" (NLS-"NCLB"). A key component of the "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001"…

Supplemental educational services (SES) is a component of the omnibus Elementary and Secondary Education Act usually referred to as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001. The law authorizes many programs besides SES, most notably Title I grants targeted to meet the needs of children in high poverty schools. As defined in the non-regulatory…

Few people have been more involved in shaping postwar U.S. education reforms--or dissented from some of them more effectively--than Chester Finn. Assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, Finn has also been a high school teacher, an education professor, a…

This article reports the plan of the U.S. Department of Education to expand a pilot initiative that would flip the order of key consequences for schools' low academic performance under the No Child Left Behind Act. Building on an initiative piloted in Virginia for school year 2006-2007, participating districts could offer a choice of supplemental…

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) is the single largest federal investment in K-12 education, supplying over $12.7 billion annually in funding to the states (Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2004). In particular, Title I of the ESEA, which was first passed by the U.S. Congress in 1965, provides federal funds to…