Special Report

In the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments … it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust […]

When standards of learning (SOLs) first appeared in my Northern Virginia public-school classroom nearly seven years ago, they were hardly more than a lunch-table punch line — another unfortunate abbreviation coined by board-of-education bureaucrats to browbeat our low-achieving, high-minority school. SOLs constituted a body of knowledge that students would learn in each academic subject. The […]

State and federal law assume that the quality of public education can be gauged by the number of students who reach the “proficiency” mark on a standardized test. Indeed, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law provides serious penalties for schools that fail to make sufficient annual gains in these numbers. It is a […]

Scotty and I shared a table in Mrs. Kerner’s kindergarten class in 1984. He was the classroom’s centripetal force, always drawing the teacher’s attention away from the rest of us. He rarely finished even the simplest assignment, instead wandering the room or doodling on his desk. He cried easily and threw raging tantrums. Other days, […]

Well before he became president, George W. Bush had made his education plan, the No Child Left Behind Act, the showcase of “compassionate conservatism” — meaning, in the conventional shorthand, a conservative route to liberal ends. Its objective was to force schools to close the huge racial achievement gaps in American education, to pay attention […]

An educated citizenry is the hallmark of America’s democracy and central to the success of its economy. That was true at the founding of the republic, when Common Sense, Thomas Paine’s call for independence, sold 112,000 copies in three months — the equivalent of 17 million today — to the remarkably literate colonial settlers of […]

This Prospect special report has demonstrated that America is needlessly generating a disproportionate number of low-wage jobs, and that other paths are possible. Low-wage America is a nation of hard-working people struggling to make ends meet — and a nation of politically disaffiliated and disempowered citizens. These two realities are related. As Christopher Jencks suggests […]

Low-wage jobs cause stagnant living standards only when they are dead-end jobs. Deliberately designed occupational pathways can enable people to move up as they acquire more skills: Entry-level wages may be low, but people advance beyond them. A plumbing apprentice, a junior associate in a law firm, a medical intern or a news clerk at […]

Dan St. Louis may never grace the cover of BusinessWeek magazine or dash off to board meetings in a Gulfstream jet. He works in a cramped, windowless office in a former Nickel’s department store that is now home to a branch of Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, N.C. But he is a man on […]

New technologies came slowly to the banking industry, but change is now coming faster and faster. The question is, who will benefit? Consider the check, a banking mainstay introduced shortly after the Civil War. For more than a century, checks were processed by hand. When a check was received, a clerk, sometimes wearing a green […]