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Although educators and school boards sometimes resist the idea, accountability is sorely needed in America's schools. Our students are falling behind those in other countries, yet compared to their foreign counterparts, our schools remain subject to little accountability. The U.S. school system lacks the marketplace accountability of schools competing with one another and the further accountability of large-scale examination systems, both of which are associated with high achievement. It is clear that after a quarter century of poor progress in educational productivity, the time has come for high academic standards and accountability.

Writing in 1912, before the Bolshevik Revolution, American socialist John Spargo said that it was "inconceivable" that a democratic socialist society would ever abolish the "sacred right" of freedom of publication which had been won at so great a sacrifice. According to Spargo, "every Socialist writer of note" agreed with Karl Kautsky that the freedom of the press, and of literary production in general, is an "essential condition" of democratic socialism.

The essential question of education policy is neither complex nor vague. In fact, it is quite simple: What works? This collection of research brought to you by the Pacific Research Institute and the Hoover Institution will do much to help schools and parents answer this question. The contributors, some of the brightest minds in education research, have studied the most pressing questions about teacher quality and practices. They have reviewed thousands of education studies, closely examined state test scores, and explored education theories of the past thirty years in order to assess where we are and where we ought to be