Andrea Hecht is a senior counsel for the Law Department of New York City. In Family Court, Hecht represents custodial parents who live out of state in matters from establishing paternity to securing child support payments from a parent who lives in...

A bipartisan proposal to change federal education law by removing the high stakes for standardized testing moved a step closer to passage when the U.S. Senate’s education committee unanimously approved the bill on April 16.

All the improvement plans of three struggling schools in the Bronx in the city's Renewal Program have been thrown up into the air with the planned co-location in their building of a Success Academy. 


The 2002 No Child Left Behind law, which mandated annual testing in grades 3–8, was riddled with unintended consequences. The major one allowed what were essentially low-quality, off-the-shelf commercial tests to drive instruction in U.S. public...

Not all assessments are created equal. The high-stakes standardized tests designed by Pearson bear little resemblance to assessments that, when designed and used by teachers themselves, allow teachers to refine their instruction and evaluate student...

This year’s English Language Arts tests, given April 14–16, were just as excessively long and tough as last year, teachers reported, leaving many angry and exasperated. Math tests did not get the same bad reviews.


The Fight for $15 movement to increase the pay of low-wage workers hit a new milestone on April 15 when 60,000 workers walked off their jobs or joined rallies in more than 200 cities across the country. Organizers are calling it the largest protest...

So much concern about tests and teacher evaluations, yet no one considers how difficult it is for our students to learn because they are too hungry, too sad or unsupervised.

You can’t compare charters to public schools, since charters do not follow the same rules that public schools follow.