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“It would look like a national system,” said Broad, describing what he would see as a perfect education infrastructure. “Rather than having 14,000 school boards across America, it would get governors involved, big city mayors involved, and it would have a longer school day and a longer school year.”

It's been a direction fueled by lots of money. In the past 13 years Broad has donated $800 million to education initiatives. A lot of it has gone to charter schools. In 2012, the KIPP charter school group got more than $2 million and Green Dot received $775,000 to supplement public funding. The online tutoring group Khan Academy received $1 million that year, too.

Broad has known all along he needs allies in public office to carry out his vision. He's generously donated to elections — from school boards to the U.S. presidency. He leans Democrat in Washington but anti-union on school boards.

High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.

In eight periods of high school classes, my host students rarely spoke.

much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.

 A brand-new study on the academic effects of homework offers not only some intriguing results but also a lesson on how to read a study — and a reminder of the importance of doing just that:  reading studies (carefully) rather than relying on summaries by journalists or even by the researchers themselves.

First, no research has ever found a benefit to assigning homework (of any kind or in any amount) in elementary school.  In fact, there isn’t even a positive correlation between, on the one hand, having younger children do some homework (vs. none), or more (vs. less), and, on the other hand, any measure of achievement.  If we’re making 12-year-olds, much less five-year-olds, do homework, it’s either because we’re misinformed about what the evidence says or because we think kids ought to have to do homework despite what the evidence says.

Second, even at the high school level, the research supporting homework hasn’t been particularly persuasive.