What happens when troubled school districts attempt aggressive reform? Can an inexperienced and polarizing new hire get the job done? Or will a long-term school administrator have more success? We try to find out in this year-long series about the school revitalization and reform efforts in Washington, DC and New Orleans--two cities that can legitimately be described as "academically bankrupt."
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This series of three reports and ten audio interviews takes a closer look at No Child Left Behind, the federal law passed in 2001 and up for reauthorization in 2007. No Child Left Behind "Race" examines how schools take advantage of "loopholes" buried in the law's fine print. End of the Line looks at how two schools in San Diego used the law to turn them around. And in Teachers Take on NCLB some of the best teachers in the country talk about how the law makes their jobs more difficult and less rewarding.
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How does having a parent in a war zone influence what students ask at school and how they learn? And what should a teacher say when a child asks, "Will my Daddy die?" or "Will Mom come back safe?" Those are the questions we ask in "Lessons of War." [MORE]

Gifted students - there are about 3 million in the US - are not getting what they need from the public education system. Programs for the gifted are disappearing in districts across the country because of budget cuts, shifting priorities and, some allege, because of the federal "No Child Left Behind" act. [MORE]

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When Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, many in the education community saw an opportunity to reform the notoriously corrupt and failing New Orleans public schools. "Stricken Schools," a 4-part report on the efforts to rebuild the district, aired on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS in 2005-2007. [MORE]

Meet inner city high school students as they attempt to secure financing critical to launching their dream of an all-natural soda company, and hear why some say entrepreneurship education is the biggest civil rights issue facing America today. [MORE]

America’s nursing shortage is bad now and getting worse. Community Colleges are the solutions, or they could be,
if only ... [MORE]

A seven part award winning series that follows a group of first year teachers struggling to learn the ropes in one of the worst schools in New York City. A primer for Teaching Fellows. [MORE]

When a list of the worst elementary schools in Tennessee came out in 2000, Chattanooga was stunned to find that nine of its schools were in the bottom 20. Embarrassed, the community decided it had to act. [MORE]

Visit Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, today, and you might think that Hurricane Katrina struck last week, not more than seven months ago. We report on what life is like at Second Street Elementary School. [MORE]

A close look at some of the complications and contradictions of Washington's effort to improve local schools. [MORE]

Parke Land is a "Turnaround Specialist", one of about a dozen public school principals hand-picked by the state of Virginia to rebuild schools stuck at the bottom. [MORE]

It was just over three years ago that Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the nation's largest public school system and appointed Joel Klein as the schools chancellor. How is Klein doing in what President Bush once called 'the toughest job in America'? [MORE]

Nearly half of all undergraduates in the US attend community colleges. These 2-year institutions, which have long been seen as higher education's poor cousin, play several critical roles: They train much of the labor force, provide remedial help for students who want to go on to 4-year colleges and universities and provide the opportunity for many of America's newest citizens. [MORE]

Women hold less than 25% of all science and engineering jobs in the government and private sectors. In academia, the gender gap is even wider - among the top 50 university science and engineering departments, on average only 15% of all tenure and tenure-track professors are women. [MORE]

The President's "No Child Left Behind Act" provides up to 2 billion dollars for after-school tutoring. Millions of students in chronically failing schools can now attend programs offered by education companies like Kaplan, Princeton Review, and Sylvan Learning Centers. [MORE]

Nearly forty gangs claim the Boyle Heights neighborhood in East LA as home turf. Beginning in elementary school, students who work hard are ridiculed by their peers and labeled a 'school girl' or a 'school boy'. Can one more gang, this one started by a teacher, counteract the negative influences? [MORE]

Each year, hundreds of thousands of Americans enroll in "adult education" classes to earn their GED, the high school equivalency diploma. The GED was created after World War II to help returning veterans continue their education and, since then, students in the program have traditionally been adults in their 20's and 30's. Today, there's a new trend: GED classes are increasingly filled with teenagers. [MORE]

Emmy Nominated

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Last year, the U.S. government spent almost 4 billion dollars recruiting soldiers for our nation's all volunteer military forces. A portion of this budget was allocated to recruit thousands of high school students across the country - a practice which has been facilitated by the No Child Left Behind act. [MORE]

Chicago International Television Awards Winner

By 2019, when this year’s fourth graders turn 24, whites will be two times as likely as blacks and three times as likely as Hispanics to have a college degree. In schools across the nation, white and Asian students outperform their black and Hispanic peers in every subject. This disparity in education is known as the "achievement gap," and it's been the subject of countless task forces and research studies. [MORE]

Chicago International Television Awards Winner

What should a public school district do if only 5% of its high school students can read at a proficient level even though it was spending $11,000 per pupil? This was the case in St. Louis last year. [MORE]

Amherst College, one of the country's most prestigious institutions, competes with Harvard, Yale, Stanford and other universities for the nation's brightest and most talented students. This year, 5,400 high school seniors applied to Amherst, hoping to snag one of just 423 spots in the freshman class. So how do highly selective colleges and universities decide who gets in and who does not? [MORE]

The Bush administration's No Child Left Behind law requires more standardized testing with far tougher tests for America's 7 million students in "special education". Depending on how you look at it, the new testing requirements are either a disaster in the making or the most exciting opportunity in decades for students with disabilities. [MORE]

Chicago International Television Awards Winner

More than 270,000 students attend the nation's 105 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The majority of these institutions were founded by former slaves following the Civil War to provide educational opportunities for blacks when there were none. [MORE]

Why would one school district turn its back on $265,000 in federal money, while a neighboring district was jumping at the chance to get $330,000? The answer lies in the details of the new federal program, "Reading First." [MORE]

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This report is on single sex education in public schools. It's banned by Title IX regulations but encouraged by "No Child Left Behind". Some say separating children by gender allows both boys and girls to learn more and that it's no different than separating children by age. Others, however, say it's the equivalent of racial segregation and is therefore unconstitutional. [MORE]

John Merrow talks with Joel Klein, the newly-appointed chancellor of the New York City public school system. [MORE]