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The recent flurry of reports and manifestos urging a more constructive federal role in K-12 education are bringing an important issue back into the policy limelight: the fact that the nation's poorest, most vulnerable students are least likely to attend schools with fully qualified staff members.

This renewed focus is long overdue. Unequal access to the most effective teachers and other school staff remains one of the most shocking inequities in the education system.  Federal leadership in closing the staffing gaps would be welcome, indeed. ...

The NEA has just released a major new paper on the federal role in education entitled Great Public Schools for Every Student by 2020. 

In doing so, they join a number of other groups that have deemed it high time to clarify the federal role after seven years of NCLB--and before a new administration arrives in January.  (See, for example, the recent report by the Forum for Education and Democracy and the even more recent statement released by a distiguished task force calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.")

NEA's report begins with the premise that NCLB has thrown the federal role out of whack, creating "top-down, command-and-control, federally prescriptive testing and accountability mandates" that have narrowed curricula, robbed assessment of its power as an instructional tool and failed to close achievement gaps. 

With the aim of ensuring universal access to great public schools by 2020, the NEA document outlines six priorities for federal involvement in education:   ...

Today, the New York Times published Jennifer Medina's story about the success of the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, a small school that sends almost all of its students--the large majority of them poor--to college. The school's inspiring success is a testament to the passion and unrelenting hard work of its staff and students.

Still, an aspect of the Times story left me distinctly uneasy. "To hear the tales of the new graduates is to understand the enormous effort and amount of resources it takes to make a school succeed," Medina writes. "Teachers and other staff members routinely work 60 hours a week....  [School Principal Elana] Karopkin said it would be unfair to say she was burned out, but admitted she was nothing less than 'exhausted,' both physically and emotionally."  Asked about her staff's workload, she replied that "nobody should be forced to choose between educating other people's children and having their own." ...

Over the past few weeks, Public School Insights has been interviewing signers of a recent statement calling for a "Broader, Bolder Approach to Education"--an approach that combines ambitious school improvement strategies with out-of-school supports for student achievement--such as early childhood education, after-school programs, and health services for children.

A few days ago, we had the privilege of interviewing Nobel prize-winning economist James Heckman, a signer whose recent work on topics such as graduation rates and the benefits of early childhood education has attracted close attention from education advocates. ...