On Monday, New Jersey senator Cory Booker announced that he’s ending his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. While the postmortem will focus on broader questions, it’s worth noting what his exit highlights about the complicated relationship Democrats have with charter schools.

Melanie Rucinski, a doctoral student in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss her new paper, “Racial Diversity in the Teacher Pipeline,” which looks at how Massachusetts might make the teaching workforce better reflect the student population.

It might be easy to get depressed about the current state of American education. We’ve just gone through a “lost decade” with flat math and reading scores and outright declines for low-performing students. Worse, stagnant achievement was not limited to K-12 students — the scores of college students and even of American adults tested on exams that compared them with peers worldwide were also flat.

Over the past nine months or so, our Moonshot for Kids initiative, a collaboration with the Center for American Progress, has given me an opportunity to think a lot about research and development in K–12 education.