At the risk of making technological marvels sound like magic potions, a very good case can be made —or more precisely, Terry Moe and John Chubb have made it in their very good book—that the most potent force for fundamentally changing such patterns of mediocrity and worse is higher and higher technology, as it can accomplish what politics and bureaucracies are encoded to block. . . .

Any national tests and standards need to be strong, substantive, and well administered. . . .

A dominant strand of U.S. educational policy for the past two decades has been incorporation of information about student achievement into management and regulation of schools. . . .

While the Senate is consumed by health care, other problem topics are piling up...