When the District of Columbia's city councilors handed Mayor Adrian Fenty control of the city's public schools in 2007, they were hoping for salvation. Or maybe just absolution. Fenty appointed Michelle Rhee, then-president of The New Teacher Project, as chancellor. She and her longtime colleague and eventual successor Kaya Henderson spent the…

From tuition vouchers for private schools to charter schools to voluntary transfer programs within and between public school systems, school choice has been at the center of the school reform debate for two decades. But with the voucher movement unable to sustain much momentum, charter schools still serving a small percentage of the nation's…

As Minnesota's experience shows, school choice is not the panacea that John Chubb and Terry Moe have proclaimed. However, introducing a marketplace into public education helps create the accountability that school reformers have sought, even as it diminishes the necessity for prescriptive mandates. When students choose their schools, they…

While reformers have taken many steps in recent years to raise student achievement, and have enacted higher standards, introduced new instructional strategies, and sought out stronger teachers, it is increasingly clear to business leaders that the public education system is not going to respond sufficiently to reformers without incentives to…