The name of the study said it all: "Sleepmore in Seattle: Later School Start times Are Associated with More Sleep and Better Performance in High School Students." In 2016-17, Seattle Public Schools pushed back high-school start times by 55 minutes, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. And just like that, students slept an average of 34 more…

In October 2018, when Tom Boasberg stepped down as superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS) after 10 years on the job, he was no doubt frustrated to see his longtime critics rejoice. What likely disappointed him most, though, was that some of his strongest supporters abandoned him, too. This article discusses how Boasberg redesigned Denver's…

Facing the typical challenges of urban schooling, including overcrowded schools, mediocre academic outcomes, and high dropout rates, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been at the epicenter of big-city education reform over the past decade. This article takes a look at the past 10 years of reform strategies in Los Angeles, and how…

Student performance on standardized tests in Louisiana has trailed national averages for decades. In the 2017 8th-grade reading results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Louisiana public schools tied for 42nd in the nation and rated significantly higher than only one jurisdiction, the District of Columbia. Only 25 percent of…

In most of the U.S., the process for assigning children to public schools is straightforward: take a student's home address, determine which school serves that address, and assign the student accordingly. However, states and cities are increasingly providing families with school choices. A key question facing policymakers is exactly how to place…

Five years ago, Baltimore City Public Schools seemed on the brink of a breakthrough. The district had been freed from mayoral control after more than a century, and a high-energy superintendent was leading bold moves to de-emphasize central administration, give schools greater autonomy, and engage families in a revitalized portfolio of educational…

In dozens of U.S. cities, more than one in five students now attend charter schools. Charter school expansion has fueled an increasingly energetic discussion among advocates: How large a share of urban schools should be charters? Is the ideal New Orleans, where nearly all public schools are charter schools? Or does that create demands on charters…

This article describes the budget crisis that the School District of Philadelphia has faced for the past few years. Three specific events triggered the 2012 crisis: an abrupt reduction in federal and state funding, the inability of the district to cut many of its costs, and political pressures on the district to spend available revenues in a given…

Research has been showing that the most important development in K-12 education over the past decade has been the emergence of a growing number of urban schools that have been convincingly shown to have dramatic positive effects on the achievement of disadvantaged students. Those with the strongest evidence of success are oversubscribed charter…

What happened to the New Orleans public schools following the tragic levee breeches after Hurricane Katrina is truly unprecedented. Within the span of one year, all public-school employees were fired, the teacher contract expired and was not replaced, and most attendance zones were eliminated. The state took control of almost all public schools…

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in America's large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class. Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even…

When Bloomberg gave his first State of the City address, in January, 2002, he announced his intention to seek mayoral control of the schools and abolish the infamous New York City Board of Education, which he called "a rinky-dink candy store." He joined a long list of New York mayors, educators, and business leaders who believed that the…

In this article the author presents Jacquelyn Davis, the executive director of the Washington office of New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS), a nonprofit dedicated to training recruits drawn from a range of sectors for leadership in failing school systems. Davis is overseeing a rapidly expanding crop of new principals who are promising to revitalize…

"Reopening the school as a public charter school" is Option #1 on the list of NCLB's restructuring alternatives for failing schools. But this has not proved a popular choice. NCLB made the bold assumption that states and districts would voluntarily turn over the reins to charter operators. The authors of the legislation must have…

Decentralization has been a popular theme in school districts for a long time. Indeed, most districts claim that they are decentralized, having latched onto the "site-based management" movement of the 1980s. Superintendents and central-office personnel point to their local school councils, staffed by parents, teachers, and school…