For the last 25 years, American education has been trying to reform itself. This effort has been noble but only partially successful, and too often defined by an "either-or" dichotomy that has led to publicly defined "wars" over reading and math instruction, and even the very existence of the U.S. Department of Education. All…

In this article, the author discusses the discrepancy in high school dropout rates throughout the U.S. and in national studies because of different measures of the dropout rate. Many states began to use a common dropout definition developed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Not included among the 37 states using the NCES…

In an interview, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told National Public Radio's Terry Gross that determining the annual funding requirements for a program such as Social Security is relatively easy. According to him, health care is very different and is a lot harder to solve than Social Security. In this article,…