Supporters of the Common Core State Standards are moving to confront increasingly high-profile opposition to the standards at the state and national levels by rallying the private sector and initiating coordinated public relations and advertising campaigns as schools continue implementation. In states such as Michigan and Tennessee, where…

As a new breed of national education advocacy organizations gains clout, they're entering into often-uneasy relationships with teachers' unions--and running into a debate about whether they can play a grassroots "ground game" comparable to that of labor. For many unions, the policy changes the newer groups typically support--staffing based on…

A new generation of education advocacy groups has emerged to play a formidable political role in states and communities across the country. Those groups are shaping policy through aggressive lobbying and campaign activity--an evolution in advocacy that is primed to continue in the 2012 elections and beyond. Though the record of their electoral…

Can a teachers' union successfully be both a hardball-playing defender of its rights and a collaborative force for the common good? It is both a question of philosophy and, increasingly, one of policy direction for the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), whose biennial convention in Detroit showed delegates grappling with the tension between…

Amid a struggling economy, a raft of foreign-policy headaches, and the tail end of a heated campaign season, President Barack Obama carved out time in his schedule last month to watch students in the State Dining Room demonstrate a solar-powered model car, a water-purification system, and a soccer-playing robot. The science fair was the fifth…

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…

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…