This article reports on new statistics which show that students with disabilities and black students are most likely to be restrained or isolated in school. As part of its most recent data collection, the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights asked more than 72,000 public schools to report how many students were isolated or…

Educators and experts alike have come to a growing realization that academic factors alone do not tell the whole story of what it means to successfully navigate the educational system through high school and into higher education or the workplace. This national report from "Education Week" investigates the role that student engagement…

For decades, when elected officials, researchers, educators, and parents have wanted a clear-eyed measure of what students know in a range of subjects, they have turned to an authoritative source: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Now the country stands poised to enter a new testing era. All but two states have agreed to work…

This article reports on the increasing attempts to identify what have been dubbed high-flying schools and figure out what makes them tick to bring all students to higher levels of achievement. A free Web site, launched by the New York City-based Standard & Poor's, began providing a tool that enables users to identify schools that do better…

This article reports on the central recommendation of the federal task force for a way to better handle dropout and graduation rates. Made up of 10 academics and government statisticians, the panel comprising the Task Force on Graduation, Completion, and Dropout Indicators was formed in the fall of 2003 to advise the U.S. Department of Education's…

Now that a high-profile and potentially influential panel has released its detailed proposal for revising the No Child Left Behind Act, the Bush administration and education groups are waiting to hear from the institution that matters most, Congress. The Aspen Institute's Commission on No Child Left Behind unveiled 75 recommendations for changes…

This article presents the special issues of the eighth edition of "Education Week's" annual report on education technology, "Technology Counts." The annual report tracks the economic and policy forces that are converging to push those changes, which are happening at the federal, state, and local levels. States and school…

The history of value-added methods in Britain dates back at least to 1982. That is when a handful of secondary schools in northeast England agreed to share data, on a confidential basis, about how much progress they were making in getting students to pass the A-level examinations required to enter universities. At least three methods of…