Hoover Institution fellow Michael Petrilli discusses education journalism.

“Parental engagement” is one of those self-evidently appealing ideas for improving education. Who doesn’t want to engage parents? What child isn’t well served by more of it? Yet doing it well is hard, because it means shooting straight with parents about how their daughters and sons are performing, and committing to making hard changes and expending real resources to help those children do better. It’s not a program. It’s a promise: to be honest and do right by all kids.

Hoover Institution fellows Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson discuss what matters most for student achievement.

It was the week identity politics ate itself. It was the week we learned that US Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is between 1/1,024th and 1/64th Native American Indian. It was also the week that Harvard University — universally acknowledged as a bastion of American liberalism — was taken to court for discriminating against Asian-American applicants.