The legacy of a policy, good or bad, can long outlive the political moment that shapes it

The pattern isn’t perfect. But over the past twenty years, the two lines appear to be moving generally in the same direction.

New research challenges the notion that ESSA has fewer federal regulations than previous iterations of the federal K–12 law.

Few of NCLB’s provisions received as much scorn as its singular focus on grade-level proficiency as the sole measure of school performance.

Like No Child Left Behind, the proposed ESSA regulations are going to stand in the way of some promising approaches to state accountability. What’s the point of that?

For all their differences, George W. Bush and Barack Obama shared a surprisingly common approach to school reform: a regulatory approach.

The larger legacy of the Every Child Achieves Act may well be how it cleans up supplement not supplant, a little discussed and often misunderstood fiscal rule

When designing accountability systems, we need to find the sweet spot between defeatism and utopianism. In my view, that’s exactly what the states are trying to do. They deserve our praise, not our derision.

Where is the “plain language” of ESEA that gives the Department of Education the authority to mandate statewide teacher-evaluation systems, particularly for states that want waivers on school accountability. Just as with ObamaCare and the question of whether the federal government is a “state,” the administration won’t have a good answer.

The administration wanted us to believe it had a smart, coherent vision and clear implementation plan for its federal education policy...until we realized it didn’t.