For the last 40 years, business leaders, philanthropists, and a host of nonprofit advocacy groups have pushed for higher standards, academic rigor, standardized testing, and newer models of educating children. But, today, some of these reformers are feeling disillusioned and believe that the investments intended to transform education and provide…

The National Urban League president and CEO Marc H. Morial weighs in on what he sees as the need for continued annual assessments of students, rejecting the course of opting out that has taken hold in some places across America. Assessment data provides students with the opportunity to receive personalized supports and necessary interventions to…

The author tells potential and sitting legislators that the education world is much more complex than it appears, and that they should study it closely and diligently, instead of reaching for simplistic, popular, and ultimately harmful solutions.

The author describes how the interactive study of social media's effect on the Common Core debate was designed and executed. Important findings from the study were: 1) We live in an increasingly interconnected social world. 2) Media has evolved over the last half century from a passive system dominated by a few central opinion makers to the…

The current tumult in the Mexican education arena has deep roots in politics and tradition, but it is latter-day global competition and international measures of student performance that are driving reform efforts. Teacher strikes and demonstrations are not new in Mexico, but issues raised by today's protesting teachers represent a combination of…

A group of New York City public school teachers, angry about the depiction of public schools in 'Waiting for Superman," decide to make their own film about the realities of the current education reform movement. They persevered even though they had no budget when they started and lacked a background in filmmaking. "The Inconvenient Truth…

Restrictions on collective bargaining are spreading. But while reformers are right to question current labor practices in education, they're wrong to believe that bargaining prohibitions will solve the problems. A smarter approach would begin by putting down the sledgehammer wielded in Wisconsin and picking up a scalpel by pushing for laws aimed…

A state legislator who played a key role in enacting the nation's first charter school law in Minnesota tells the story of shaping the ideas and the bill. She now looks for ways that charter schools can coexist with traditional public schools to deliver a better education for all children.

People dislike the Common Core for several different reasons, and so it is important to disaggregate the sources of opposition and to assess and then to dispel some of the myths that have built up around it. It also is important to understand the unusual political alliances that have emerged in opposition to Common Core implementation and how they…