Siobhan Gorman

Williams is facing a problem with which nearly every Democratic urban mayor across the country struggles. Constituents are screaming for educational alternatives, and most of the options on the table have been exhausted, except, it seems, for one: vouchers. The Democratic Party has long opposed vouchers, more on political than policy grounds, but Williams’s choice […]

As we got started, Weaver reminded me that I was sitting in the (quite plush) corner office of “the president of the largest union in the country.” The NEA has 2.7 million members. I asked him what he thought about an accountable voucher proposal, which from a union’s perspective mixes the worst of both worldsvouchers […]

When it comes to school reform, President Bush backs high standards and high-stakes tests, which form the core of the education plans currently before Congress. By contrast, Rebell believes in “throwing money” at schools, an objective that he’s discovered can sometimes be accomplished by suing states to force them to spend more money on urban […]

Now, after years of exacerbating class differences among the college-bound, test-prep companies are expanding their offerings downward to cover children as young as six. The reason is the testing mania spawned by the school reform movement. In the 1990s, outraged by the low quality of so many public schools, many states, encouraged by Washington, imposed […]