Spurred by court rulings requiring states to increase public-school funding, the United States now spends more per student on K-12 education than almost any other country. Yet American students still achieve less than their foreign counterparts, their performance has been flat for decades, millions of them are failing, and the poor and minority students remain far behind their more advantaged peers.

Forget everything you think you know about school reform. Cutting through the cant, sentiment, and obfuscation characterizing the current school reform debate, Frederick M. Hess lacerates teh conventional “status quo” reform efforts and exposes the naivete underlying reform strategies that rest on solutions like class size reduction, small schools, and enhanced professional development.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the single most influential piece of federal education legislation in American history, and Hess and Petrilli provide a concise yet comprehensive look at this important and controversial act. Signed into law in 2002, NCLB seeks to ensure that all American students are proficient in math, reading, and science by 2014. Trumping two centuries of state primacy in K-12 education, it set standards for measuring student performance, ensuring the quality of teachers, and providing options for students in ineffective schools.

In a country long divided by race and class, Susan Eaton set out to see if separate can ever really be equal. She immersed herself for four years in one of the best all-minority school: Simpson-Waverly Elementary, which has been declared a Blue Ribbon school by the Bush Administration. Located in Hartford, Connecticut, the poorest city in the wealthiest state in the nation, it is a glaring example of the deepening educational disparity found across the country -- in cities like Detroit, Miami, Newark, Providence, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Fresno.