Illustration by Chris Gall. Few urban school superintendents remain in place for long nowadays. According to the Council of the Great City Schools, they last an average of 2.5 years. Like mythological children sent to appease the ravening monster, the chief education officers are ready sacrifices offered up when things go badly. Replacing the person [...]

By The Editors
Features

Lobbying in Disguise

Do Charter Schools Measure Up? The Charter School Experiment After 10 Years by the American Federation of Teachers

By ROBERT MARANTO
Features

The Human Capital Century

Has U.S. leadership come to an end?

By CLAUDIA GOLDIN
Features

High Stakes in Chicago

Illustration by Noah Woods. As the first large urban school district to introduce a comprehensive accountability system, Chicago provides an exceptional case study of the effects of high-stakes testing-a reform strategy that will become omnipresent as the No Child Left Behind Act is implemented nationwide. One of the most serious criticisms of high-stakes testing is [...]

By Brian A. Jacob
Features, Standards, Testing, and Accountability

Fanatical Secularism

The missionaries in public schools

By CHARLES GLENN
Features

Choice & Freedom

Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman was among the first (John Stuart Mill made a similar proposal 100 years earlier) to propose that the financing of education be separated from the administration of schools, the core idea behind school vouchers. In a famous 1955 essay, Friedman argued that there is no need for government to run [...]

By PEARL ROCK KANE
Features

The Philadelphia Experiment

The story behind Philadelphia’s Edison contract

By Jay Mathews
Features

Reaching the Ideal

Special education has its problems, but they mainly follow from the failure of schools to comply fully with the law

By RUD & ANN P. TURNBULL
Forum

Sisyphean Tasks

Illustration by Elizabeth Lada. In a recent report for the Abell Foundation, Kalman R. Hettleman documented the troubled history of special education in the Baltimore public school system. He attributed the failure to “the compliance maze” that special education teachers and administrators face, which consists of “ever-proliferating procedures, forms to be filled out, micro-managed administrative [...]

By Patrick J. Wolf
Features, Forum, Journal