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Maybe we can all agree on a basic starting point: no one is perfect, and every individual and organization should strive for growth and improvement. To go a step further, perhaps we can all agree that it is our shared responsibility to monitor public institutions - including schools, school districts, state and federal governments - and hold them to high standards. What happens when we fall short?  Or when "they" fall short?  How do we respond?  What do we want to see happen?  Too often in this culture, I think we assign blame.  Someone must be held accountable - and if it wasn't my job, then I certainly can't be blamed for the results.  By shaming or punishing those responsible, we feel like we've done our job as monitors or guardians of whatever values we uphold and whatever institutions have let us down.  It feels good, doesn't it - seeing the scandal hit home, the lies revealed, the hypocrites exposed, the inept upbraided and the corrupt brought low?

The dismantling of so many charters has some experts worrying that when students are forced to leave educational environments where they have friends and feel comfortable, the disruption is destabilizing and upsetting to some of the system's most vulnerable populations. Robert Slavin, director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, believes closure should be a last resort, after giving schools support and experimenting with solutions. Otherwise, well-meaning educational programs could wind up hurting the very kids they are trying to help. "Letting alone or closing are not the only two options," Slavin said. Closing "is very damaging to kids."

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated with a 0.7 percent increase in mean male hourly wages. Further, the observed positive wage effect is not limited to the lower tail of the wage distribution but appears to persist throughout the distribution. Though there is an extensive literature attempting to estimate the effect of retention on the retained, this analysis offers what may be the first estimates of average long-run impacts of retention on all students.

Since 1968, the black middle class in America has quadrupled, Henry Louis (Skip) Gates told a packed house at the Edgartown Whaling Church on Thursday evening. But that was the only positive news in an otherwise bleak survey of the state of black education by a panel of experts convened by Professor Gates and the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Forty charter schools have seen their licenses revoked, denied or surrendered since the much vaunted alternative education program began more than a decade ago.

New York City has plans to close 22 "failing" schools, taking the view that if those schools can't do right by their students, they shouldn't continue to exist. Because students deserve better, and if you don't agree with what Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his assorted education chancellors think is best, then you don't care about kids.