Special Report

An undisclosed location, Va. — From the outside, the headquarters of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign is completely unremarkable — so unremarkable that passersby have no way of knowing it’s even there. Through the tinted windows of the Arlington office tower where the headquarters is lodged, people shuffling papers can be glimpsed as through a glass […]

Observers marveling at President George W. Bush’s ability to push a radical agenda through a closely divided Congress have tended to attribute the administration’s success to the impressive party discipline within the Republican congressional caucus. And impressive it is — both historically and, especially, in comparison to the anarchic behavior of the Democrats during the […]

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 […]