In statehouses and cities across the country, battles are raging over the direction of education policy--from the standards that will shape what students learn to how test results will be used to judge a teacher's performance. Students and teachers, in passive resistance, are refusing to take and give standardized tests. Protesters have marched to…

By nearly all accounts, the staff and students at Sandy Hook Elementary School did everything right on Dec. 14--and with the security measures they took before that day--when a young man armed with powerful weapons blasted his way into the school. But the deadliest K-12 school shooting in American history, a day that President Barack Obama has…

Faced with arguably the biggest crisis of its 155-year history--the loss of at least 100,000 full-time members--the nation's largest union plans to respond by organizing thousands of new members and transforming itself into an even more politically potent force. Whether the National Education Association (NEA) can accomplish those goals while…

In nearly 40 years of legislative advocacy, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)--a free-market, limited-government group now drawing intense scrutiny for its support of a controversial self-defense law--has had a significant influence on K-12 education through its model legislation and work with state lawmakers to promote such…

Every day, 14 retired teachers and other school employees arrive at the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers' headquarters and go to work for Hillary Rodham Clinton. The retirees--working with volunteers and union staff members from as far away as Alaska--are working to inform teachers' union members why the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)…

Mr. Barr, a Democratic political organizer who turned charter school mogul, has waged a contentious, two-year campaign to persuade leaders in the nation's second-largest school system to let him run one or more troubled high schools. Mr. Barr, with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, set to assume some control of the district on Jan. 1, 2007, where he may…

Michael A. Rebell, a 61-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer, is one of a small band of lawyers whose legal efforts are changing the way many states pay for their public schools. He was among many lawyers of the era who had been inspired by landmark cases such as "Brown v. Board of Education." In the late 1980s, he noticed education cases would…