CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Since 1987, when the federal education secretary called Chicago Public Schools the “worst in the nation,” officials searched for answers.

Some came through a partnership between the Chicago Public School District and the University of Chicago. The Consortium on School Research, founded in 1990, identifies the problems facing the urban school district and assesses how well different initiatives are working...

Family problems, absences and poor grades can drive students to becoming a dropout. But what actually drives many teenagers to quit school, say experts, is a sense that nobody in the building cares about them—and it’s a belief that is often reinforced after they leave.

“When schools don’t follow up with students who leave, it reaffirms the idea that no one cares,” says Jody Manning of the PACER Center, which advocates for youth with disabilities...

Last Sunday, the New York Times Magazine published an interview—David Marchese talking with Melinda Gates—about the enormous power of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for shaping our lives.  Marchese asks Ms. Gates directly about the Gates Foundation’s role in driving today’s neoliberal public education policy. Doesn’t a giant foundation—“Its endowment at $50.7 billion… the largest in the world.”—have an outsized impact on social policy?

After a decade of tax cuts brought by Governor John Kasich and a supermajority Republican Ohio Legislature,  Ohio—still dominated in the House, Senate and Governor’s mansion by Republicans—is considering a new school funding formula intended to address what have been glaring problems for the state’s public schools. The new plan is bipartisan. We all owe enormous thanks to Representatives Robert Cupp and John Patterson for their leadership.

North Chicago Community High School will revive a freshman academy starting next year with the goal of catching struggling students early and eventually boosting the school’s graduation rate.

The new academy will include dedicating a wing of the school just for freshmen, and providing a “wraparound approach” with new programming and staff, Superintendent John Price said...

The assumption sits at the heart of a raging debate about elite high schools in Boston and New York City: that schools like Stuyvesant and Boston Latin offer the very best preparation for college that the public school system can provide.

“Why isn’t every public school in New York City a Brooklyn Tech-caliber school?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said recently, referring to one of New York City’s test-in high schools. “Every one should be.”

Does the current drive to incorporate social and emotional learning, or SEL, into the K–12 curriculum represent a positive reform that will lead schools to educate the “whole student” and ultimately boost young people’s academic success? Or is it a distracting fad that comes with high opportunity costs?

When decisions about high school acceptances post later today on GoCPS, 16.2 percent of Chicago eighth-graders will get their top pick of the city’s most competitive test-in high schools, a 2 percentage point increase from last year’s 14.4 percent.