While overall graduation rates are improving, persistent disparities in graduation rates among groups of students remain, and must be addressed. High school reform is a viable approach to addressing these disparities. Early College High Schools, Small Schools of Choice, and Career Academies are all secondary school reform models that have been…

In chemistry, a catalyst accelerates change without being depleted. As we seek school improvement, we need sustainable, scalable changes, and therefore catalytic structures are ideal. From communities of practice to professional learning communities to Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) much has been made in the scholarly and consultancy…

Higher education institutions must prepare students for success in the dynamic knowledge economy by providing a high-quality educational experience. As the world and our understanding of learning processes continually evolve, educators face the challenge of developing innovative strategies to engage and motivate students in their own learning.…

This new edition of Successful School Leadership brings in the latest evidence and material to what has remained a popular publication. While the fundamentals of what drives successful school leadership remain the same, new evidence further supports the arguments put forward by Christopher Day and Pam Sammons back in 2016. The growing interest in…

Higher education expert William F. Massy's decades as a professor, senior university officer, and consultant have left him with a passionate belief in the need for reform in America's traditional universities. In "Reengineering the University," he addresses widespread concerns that higher education's costs are too high, learning falls…

In this HEPI paper, two authors with considerable expertise in evaluating higher education systems around the world assess higher education institutions that are not funded directly by taxpayers--known in the UK as alternative providers. Since the start of the century, alternative providers have been growing rapidly. This raises a number of…

Working with partners including the Department of Education at Oxford University, the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, the University of Glasgow, the University of Nottingham and the Hong Kong Institute of Education, "Education Development Trust" has commissioned a series of reviews of international…

Planning for policy implementation is as important as the implementation itself. A policy's intent can be subverted by the way the policy is implemented, or when unanticipated outcomes take precedence over the true intent. This article presents three cases of specific instances of unintended outcomes from policy implementation and presents a…

With research indicating that upwards of 50 percent of all new entering postsecondary education students are placed into remedial education and that students placed into remedial education are less likely to earn a postsecondary credential, policymakers and postsecondary leaders alike have committed themselves to transforming remedial education in…

One objective of the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) School Improvement Grants (SIG) and Race to the Top (RTT) program is to help states enhance their capacity to support the turnaround of low-performing schools. This capacity may be important, given how difficult it is to produce substantial and sustained achievement gains in low-performing…

This overview focuses on Europe, a linguistically diverse region and moreover home to a number of minority languages. Over the past five decades, the focus of research on bi- or multilingual education has shifted from an initial emphasis on speakers' identities and their membership of homogenous imagined communities to an interest in learners'…

Many mentoring policies do not differentiate between novice special education teachers and their general education counterparts. Although novice special education teachers may benefit in part from general induction practices, their experience is limited when there is little attention given to their unique instructional needs. Policymakers can…

This monograph provides educational researchers, policymakers, and practitioners with an overview of existing knowledge regarding factors that influence success among racial and ethnic minority students in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) circuit. To accomplish this task, the authors reviewed more than four hundred…

State educational accountability models are in transition. Whether modifying the present accountability system to comply with existing state and federal requirements or anticipating new ones--such as the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) Race to the Top competition--recording the experiences of state education agencies (SEAs) that are currently…

It is hard to imagine a more critical time for helping the low-skilled and disenfranchised youth in our communities to become gainfully employed. Even as the nation suffers through its worst economic downturn in decades, America's business and industry leaders are predicting an unprecedented shortage of educated and skilled workers to meet the…