This article reports on the rise of nonunion advocacy groups for teachers which has enabled them to cut their teeth on policy issues that affect the profession. The teachers' unions remain the most visible, powerful, and probably the most important advocates for teachers. But over the past few years, a number of new efforts have sprung up…

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…

The world of virtual schooling is experiencing a host of major policy shifts that are opening doors for its expansion, but at the same time holding it up to greater scrutiny. This special report, the first in a three-part 2012-2013 series on virtual education, examines how state policymakers, educators, and schools are rethinking and changing the…

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…

School districts and educators chafing under the mandates of the No Child Left Behind Act are hoping to prod the U.S. Department of Education into giving them a reprieve from the provisions they see as most onerous, as the prospects for an overhaul of the law by Congress anytime soon remain cloudy. The Obama administration and congressional…

In Baltimore, Chicago, New York, Oakland, California and Philadelphia, to name a few cities where it has been active, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has emerged as a major player in K-12 in education issues. Its army of organizers has tackled everything from a lack of stop signs to such vexing issues as teacher…