It used to be that when people talked about urban school success stories, Catholic schools were at the center of the discussion. Twenty years ago, Cardinal John O’Connor, then archbishop of New York, all but dared public school leaders to send their hardest-to-teach students to archdiocesan schools. “Send me the lowest-performing 5 percent of children presently in the public sc...

Emily Krone Phillips is the author of the new book The Make-or-Break Year, which chronicles how Chicago Public Schools used the metric Freshman OnTrack to boost graduation rates. Now at the Spencer Foundation, she was previously at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, where the Freshman OnTrack research originated. I recently talked with Emily about dropouts...

Last week, presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for more regulations on existing charter schools and a moratorium on federal funding for new ones. In the Wall Street Journal, Jason L. Riley notes that this stance is likely to cost Sanders support among black voters, who strongly favor charter schools and school vouchers. Riley writes Mr. Sanders’s claim notwithstanding...

Editor’s note: This post reproduces a letter sent to Secretary of Education John King on July 29.  Dear Mr. Secretary: I am writing to suggest two very specific changes to the proposed rule that your department published on May 31, 2016, regarding the implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), and its provisions for school-level accountability. 1. For the “a...

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side by Eve L. Ewing University of Chicago Press, 2018, $22.50; 240 pages. As reviewed by Paul E. Peterson Closing schools is as American as the 19th-century homesteading land rush. Indeed, it’s the flip side of desperate sprints for land, silver, or gold. When people race for distant treasure, they leave...

Last weekend, graduating seniors at Morehouse College received a surprise gift from their commencement speaker. Billionaire Robert F. Smith surprised the crowd by announcing that he was making a grant to eliminate the student debt of the entire Class of 2019, Bo Emerson reports. In the days since the announcement, lots of questions have been raised about how the gift will wor...

An analysis by the Wall Street Journal finds that the number of high school students being given special allowances for test-taking, such as extra time, has surged in recent years. Douglas Belkin, Jennifer Levitz, and Melissa Korn also report that “students in affluent areas such as Scarsdale, Weston and Newton are more likely than students elsewhere to get the fastest-gr...

After almost eighteen years in the field of education, I have become convinced of the need to transform the way our children learn so that they can confront the unknowable challenges of the twenty-first century. I applaud any effort aimed at changing the mindset of those involved in the education system so that they can leave behind the traditional twentieth-century paradigm, w...