The roots of the Brookings Institution were planted in 1916 by a group of reformers interested in a private, fact-based organization to study national policy issues. It was the first of its kind, and today the Brookings Institution enjoys wide recognition and has established itself as a respectable name in policy thought. Its work garners frequent mention in national media outlets and regularly tops lists of organizations most often cited by the U.S. Congress. Brookings has five main research programs—economic studies, foreign policy, global economy and development, governance studies, and metropolitan policy. Although there is some program overlap, governance studies houses research in the field of education. Although Brookings scholars took an interest in education policy as far back as 1936, its main contributions to ...