Future of American Education Project

Announcement today from American Enterprise Institute.

Frederick M. Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies, and Henry Olsen, director of AEI’s National Research Initiative, have announced a new AEI research effort to discover and promote original empirical work on K-12 school reform.

Codirected by Hess and Olsen, this education research project encompasses a wide range of important issues including federal education policy (such as No Child Left Behind), school governance, choice-based reform (such as vouchers, charter schools and tax incentives), school and district leadership, and teacher quality.

At the heart of this education research project is a working group consisting of twenty leading reform-minded U.S. researchers and educators. Trained in a variety of disciplines and approaching the challenges of K-12 reform from a range of perspectives, the working group will convene semiannually to suggest new lines of research, and to establish a respected forum for discussion of all new provocative K-12 education reform issues. The goal of the Future of American Education working group is not simply to rehash familiar arguments or to repackage previously published work, but to influence and encourage the national education debate for years to come. Its first meeting convened at AEI on December 12, 2007.