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Secretary Duncan gives community schools a central place in the Pantheon of education innovations. He made that abundantly clear in his recent appearance on Charlie Rose.

He advocates for keeping schools open 12 or 13 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week, and 12 months out of the year. He sees schools as centers of learning and community well-being. He calls for stronger partnerships between schools and non-profits. He supports stronger investments in students health, nutrition and safety. He champions a vision of accountability that includes "traditional educators, parents, students, the business community--all of us." And he links these strategies to student learning:

The more we open school buildings to the community, the more we work together--not just with our children but with the families--the more we create an environment where ...

In his March 10th speech before the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama repeated his campaign pledge to help states expand and improve early learning programs.

In defiance of skeptics who question the value or feasibility of early childhood education, the National Association of State Boards of Education points to Obama's home state of Illinois. The Illinois program can boast both strong acadmic results and cost-effectiveness, NASBE argues in a recent policy brief:

Illinois met nine of its 10 benchmarks for pre-k quality, ranked... 12th in access for 4-year-olds and first in the nation for 3-year-olds, while spending slightly more than ...

All the recent talk about 21st-century learning has sparked heated debate about curriculum and instruction. The broader implications of this debate are important. The way we describe 21st-century demands on schools and youth can have a profound impact on the fate of the liberal arts in our schools.

The skepticism about recent 21st-century talk isn’t surprising. I suspect many educators who champion the liberal arts see them as a bulwark against the 21st century’s worst influences. I know I did when I taught literature and philosophy. Thoreau offers a healthy antidote to rampant consumerism. Langston Hughes’s poems aren’t trying to sell you anything. James Joyce’s novels demand the kind of sustained attention required by few blog postings and no Twitter messages. Mary Cassat’s women have no place in an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue.

We value such work for its timelessness, but also because it stands against so much that disappoints or outrages us about current times. It reinforces certain decidedly nineteenth-century (and older) values, habits and skills that can fortify young people against the worst 21st-century dangers: dangers like shrinking attention spans, growing consumerism, the sexualization of children, etc. People understandably recoil from the slightest suggestion that pre-21st-century skills are passé or unequal to the demands of a new century.

Still, schools cannot wall students off from the technologies and media that amplify both the best and the worst the 21st century has to offer. They face an important challenge: How do they help students use technology and new media responsibly? How do they acknowledge and incorporate 21st-century influences while helping students master a long intellectual tradition? How do they use that tradition ...

The Teacher Leaders Network just hosted a fascinating discussion on creativity in the classroom. A number of teachers involved in the discussion zeroed in on a matter that has again been looming large in debates about national standards: The tension between standardization and personalization. They wrote about the challenge of teaching basic information all students need to know "whether they find it creative or not" while engaging students' individual interests.

In other venues, similar discussions have drawn extremists like flies to honey. In the comments section of one top blog, for example, a privatization zealot credited the lack of common standards in private schools with those schools' alleged success: "No one argues that private schools are failing," Of course, we don't exactly have common measures for determining a private school's success or failure. And comparisons of private and public school NAEP scores show essentially no difference between private and public school performance.  By why let data cloud ideology?

On the other side, the most immoderate critics of ...