Sandy Kress, the controversial testing lobbyist, is leading a new raid on our school taxes. This month he registered to lobby for Amplify, the company that wants to replace textbooks with tablet computers, positioning him to grab some of the hundreds of millions of dollars Education Sec. Arne Duncan...

We thought the big controversies in the Sochi Winter Olympics would be toothpaste terrorism or government-sanctioned homophobia. Then the press tried to check into their hotels and discovered a comical array of foibles that will do nothing to boost the Russian tourism industry. But what shocks the traveling press corps...

When the Canutillo Independent School District found out its superintendent was cooking the books just like in nearby El Paso, the board members knew they had a problem on their hands. But for a couple of local lobbyists, a school cheating scandal was just another business opportunity, underscoring the extent...

America, the elites are very disappointed in you. We're not keeping up with South Korea and Singapore, they tell us, because you are coddling your mediocre children who are being taught by bottom-of-the-barrel teachers. But have no fear, help is on the way! Pearson, the testing company that has gotten...

Thanks to New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, the charitable arm of testing giant Pearson will pay $7.7 million to end his investigation into whether it was illegally helping its for-profit parent company. This comes as a shock to Texans, where Pearson has an eye-popping $462-million testing contract,...

It's not every day that Democrats and Republicans get to shake their fist in the same direction. That honor goes to Education Sec. Arne Duncan whose insult against "white, suburban moms" whose "child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were" has sparked outrage from the tea party...

Is your child's teacher highly qualified? Thanks to a loophole snuck into the bill to end the federal government shutdown, there's really no way of knowing.

Here's how it's supposed to work: Under No Child Left Behind, all schools -- even the ones where the poor and minority students...

Last week's news contained some factual errors that merit correction. We strive for accuracy at all times and regret falling short in these rare instances.

An article on Sunday claimed that the National Security Agency collected data on tens of millions of phone calls in France and Spain. In actual...

A supposedly disaffected generation is protesting standardized testing. Parents are refusing to let schools give their kids the tests. Teachers are refusing to administer the tests. School boards are begging for relief from testing mandates. That's all nice, say the dwindling number of defenders of linking...

Recently, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said you're either "moving forward with courageous reforms" and "piloting new and better assessments" (the graduate school term for "standardized tests"), or you're one of the "arm chair pundits who insist our efforts are doomed to fail." Duncan exposed his own fallacy when he...

The news that a freshman has founded a White Student Union at Georgia State University, one of the most diverse campuses in the country, has come across like a harmless college prank. In a summer filled with Paula Deen's allegations, racist rodeo clowns, George Zimmerman's acquittal, and Republican accusations...

Now that he has renounced his Canadian citizenship, Sen. Ted Cruz must run for president, but not to save our country from falling deficits, 41 straight months of private-sector job growth, and forcing health insurance companies to spend your premiums on health care. No, our very junior...

This summer I took my sons on a civil rights tour of the South. I wanted them to see the best of our history, how we rose above the institutionalized evil of slavery and segregation to form a more perfect union. If I'd planned it better, we would have stopped...

Just like AAA ratings on mortgage-backed securities led to Wall Street's 2008 disaster, a rash of accountability scandals might be precursors to a similar public school crash. After years of promises that test-driven accountability would yield miracles, scandals with school ratings are popping up all over the country. Unless we...

Denise Romano would make a lousy terrorist. She has a severe chronic refractory cough that causes her to pass out several times a day. She uses a walker so she has something to lean on when she gets one of her coughing fits. She can't drive. During the "people's filibuster,"...

Offering unsolicited advice about whether Sen. Wendy Davis should run for statewide office is like playing cops and robbers with finger guns. No one believes there's a bullet when you yell "Bang!", and no one ever gets hurt.

But there are rooms in Texas where she seeks advice. There are...

For the first time since George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, the House has passed a major rewrite of federal education law. On Friday, the House approved the Student Success Act along party lines -- Republicans for, Democrats against -- but the bill has little chance of...

To understand why Texas' new anti-abortion law is an invasion of privacy, you have to know my friend. It's a sad story, and despite what Texas Republicans might claim, it has nothing to do with abortion. It does have to do with a woman's wellbeing, however, which is why his...

For Texas, it's the end of an error. Gov. Rick Perry, who became governor before the inventions of the iPod, hybrid cars and YouTube, will forgo reelection while not closing the door for a second run for president. Perry might be moving on, but he's leaving behind a legacy...

Let us now praise famous mobs. There's been an excessive amount of tut-tutting over the "unruly mob, using Occupy Wall Street tactics" (Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst) for "hijacking ... the democratic process" (Gov.-for-Life Rick Perry) with "Obama-style mob tactics" (The Dew again). True, the gallery drowned out...