June Kronholz writes that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish about competi­tion. In fact, American educators have had a love/hate relationship with it over the past century. But what we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system.

It was just about a year ago that I first started paying attention to Edutopia. They’ve been around for years, but they weren’t on my radar screen. Then suddenly, they wouldn’t stay off it. You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing their ubiquitous underwriting credit on NPR, with its sublimely confident tagline “What Works in Public Education.”

In a new book, The Making of Americans, E.D. Hirsch explicitly connects the idea of cultural literacy to the subject of civics—“the role of a common system of public schools in educating a citizenry to the level necessary to maintain a democracy.”

EdNext is teaming with authors of newly released books to provide 15-minute audio excerpts...

There is no end to the debate over intelligence. The latest book-length entry into this debate is University of Michigan psychology professor Richard Nisbett’s "Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count."

Controversies surrounding the celebration of Columbus Day raise a number of interesting questions. Unfortunately, many of the new answers offered are at least as simplistic and historically false as the established answers they are meant to replace.

A new study does not demonstrate what the authors believe it demonstrates: that teaching more science content leads only to more content knowledge, not to higher-level science competence.

With all the talk about workplace-readiness in education reform, one would think that students who enter college would look carefully at the coursework that leads to high-paying jobs.

Why do boys outperform girls in math, especially at the highest levels of math achievement? Two sets of economists released papers this summer examining the size of the gender gap in math achievement and investigating some possible contributing factors.

Most educators probably aren't surprised that more than two-thirds of high school seniors don't recognize the value of what they have to learn.