John Hechinger & Suzanne Sataline: More U.S. cities are considering scrapping a longstanding tradition in American education, the elected school board, and opting to let mayors rule over the classroom. Dallas and Milwaukee are currently mulling mayoral control of the city's schools, and Detroit is u...

Andrew Rotherham: The President's speech today includes a lot of interesting tidbits, a shout-out for performance pay, a call to lift charter school caps, and even a very pro-Broad Prize signal embedded in the data section. I've been lukewarm on some of the stimulus, more on that later, but this is ...

Chicago Tribune Editorial: We wrote last week about Democratic efforts to strip 1,900 low-income Washington children of $7,500 "opportunity scholarships" to attend private schools. It's an experiment in school vouchers, an experiment with little potential downside. But it's an experiment that was la...

Andrew Coulson, via a kind reader's email: This week, education secretary Arne Duncan referred to DC public schools as a district with " more money than God." Perhaps he was thinking of the $24,600 total per-pupil spending figure I reported last year in the Washington Post and on this blog. If so, h...

Letters to the Wall Street Journal: Regarding William McGurn's Main Street column "Will Obama Stand Up for These Kids?" (March 3): The Opportunity Scholarship program was created in 2003, as a five-year pilot project designed to give District of Columbia students federally paid vouchers to attend pr...

Bruce Fuller: President Obama's massive education initiative detailed in his proposed budget aims at the right challenge - lifting our schools and narrowing achievement gaps. But huge chunks of his eye-popping $131 billion package, now before Congress, would go for stale federal programs that have l...

William McGurn: Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama's new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position. The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation's capital. Unlike the ...

Alan Borsuk: You're now welcome to put up advertising inside Milwaukee public schools - provided you can meet more than 15 restrictions on what the ads say and where they're placed. An end to the ban on advertising inside schools was sought by MPS athletic commissioner Bill Molbeck and others who ar...

Alan Borsuk: A group of community leaders who disagree on a lot of other things about education were in general agreement Monday night on one important issue: They don't think much of the idea of turning control of Milwaukee Public Schools over to somebody other than the School Board. From teachers ...

AP: Evers won the endorsement of the 98,000-member state teachers union, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, which paid for TV ads on his behalf. Evers was the only one of the five to pay for his own ads. "I believe that my message of experience has played well so far," Evers said. "I won t...