Despite ongoing school improvement efforts, there are more factors at work to stabilize schools than to change them. Stabilizing factors pervade school organization, curriculum context, unadventuresome textbooks, teacher isolation, and standardized testing practices. Educational innovation is predicated on change in form, content, and goals and…

Meaningful and educationally significant school reform will require attention to five dimensions of schooling: the intentional, structural, curricular, pedagogical, and evaluative. Eight factors make change in schools difficult, including teacher isolation, persistence of school norms, inadequate in-service education, and internalized teacher…

Current federal efforts to reform U.S. education overemphasize competition, measurement, and the education-work relationship; distract educators and educational policymakers from tackling structural inertia problems besetting schools; and engender cynicism and passive resistance in already overworked teachers. America 2000 fails to use serious…