If you can believe the daily flood of mass media stories, journal articles, and white papers, the United States is facing a STEM worker crisis. Business leaders and politicians warn that the nation is falling hopelessly behind in the global economic race because our students are unprepared for and uninterested in science, technology, engineering,…

This article features an interview with Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings. In this interview, Hastings relates that he told the "Wall Street Journal" in 2008 that he started looking at education--trying to figure out why our education is lagging when our technology is increasing at great rates and there's great innovation in so many other areas…

In this article, the author discusses neoliberalism as an extension of settler colonialism. The article provides commentary on five recent articles on teacher education and the neoliberal agenda. The article presents an analysis of neoliberalism as despair, and as a form of nihilism. The author discusses an indigenous model of school reform and…

Today's education technology holds immense promise, but what matters more than the tools themselves are how they are used in schools and in classrooms. In "Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age," Frederick M. Hess and Bror Saxberg argue that educators have tended to think of adopting technology as a way to "reform" or…

Jim Garrison's article (Garrison 2012) critiques current reforms in the United States for fostering a harmful "standardization" in schooling, which threatens to further undermine the country's democratic heritage and to prepare many students for servitude in an oppressive social order. John Dewey is cited throughout, as befits Professor…

This article introduces a conversation with Brett Peiser, named chief executive officer of "Uncommon Schools" in July of 2012, along with the principal of North Star Academy Vailsburg Middle School, a charter school in Newark, New Jersey's West Ward. There is no doubt that "Uncommon Schools" has given thousands of low-income…

Participating in the Save Our School march was an inspiring event, the reverberating impact from which will be long-lasting. The march, which was endorsed by the Executive Board of Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), was an effort to call awareness to the struggles that public education faces in the United States. The guiding…

The author, a teacher-activist with Teacher Action Group-Philadelphia (TAG), presents her views on the need for teachers to get involved in the battle for public education. She expresses her concerns about the political games being played to advance a neoliberal agenda that seeks to dispossess students of their right to a quality education and…

As charter schools multiply, public school teachers and administrators need to understand the policy landscape in which charters are skimming money from their traditional local public schools, making scarce resources even scarcer. In this essay, the author discusses a related phenomenon that is part of some school reform plans--the reconstitution…

Corporate school reformers like to call themselves just "reformers" and counterpose themselves to the "status quo." There is no doubt that the corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as "education reformers." However, this political branding has little to do with reality or the substance of the issues under debate.…

Coalition education policy threatens to transform the school system in England. A combination of public spending cuts, and the drive to making all schools Academies, represents a key moment in the restructuring of the education service along neo-liberal lines. This article argues that there is nothing distinctively "new" about Coalition…

In this article, the author answers Mark Holmes's comments on his article "Imagined Evidence and False Imperatives." Certainly, readers can see in Holmes's comment the prevailing disagreement about the importance of existing data sets to an assessment of the effects of competition and other aspects of genuine markets. Holmes acknowledges the…

In his essay "Individuality, Equality, and Creative Democracy--the Task Before Us," Jim Garrison (2012, in this issue) restates Dewey's call "to educate individuals capable of criticizing and recreating society--not simply reproducing the status quo." He writes that under the new structural feudalism, "schools assume the…

School reformers have made forward strides in the last ten years, and public debate has acquired a bipartisan cast. But just how successful have reform efforts been? The editors of "Education Next" assess the movement's victories and challenges. Two essays are presented in this issue's "Forum": (1) "A Battle Begun, Not Won" (Paul E. Peterson,…

This book's title, "I Used to Think... And Now I Think...", is borrowed from an exercise often used at the end of teacher professional development sessions, in which participants write down how what they've learned has changed their thinking. The resulting essays model the ongoing process of reflection and growth among those deeply committed to…