The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

Education Funders Research Initiative (EdFunders), a project of Philanthropy New York, is supported by a group of diverse funding organizations that have pursued an array of education reform strategies. EdFunders have come together to engage New Yorkers and focus leaders on new research into how to best prepare students for college and…

President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land-grant Act in 1862, launching a nationwide project in public higher education that would build democracy, prosperity, and competitiveness to levels undreamed of 150 years ago. As student costs skyrocket, driven by steep drops in public funding, the viability of that project, like the nation itself, is under…

This book, prepared in the context of the "UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD)", also known as "Rio+20", contains the papers submitted to the "World Symposium on Sustainable Development at Universities (WSSD-U-2012)", which took place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on 5 and 6 June 2012. It pursues the following main aims: to document and…

This document reports on a focus group meeting convened by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE) Board of Directors to examine the concept of educational accountability for all students, including students with disabilities. The outcome of the meeting was a definition of "accountability" and a…

The U. S. is losing its competitive edge in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Thomas Friedman warns that America is not producing enough young people in STEM fields that are essential for entrepreneurship and innovation in the 21st century (The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, 2005). Blue ribbon…

This publication brings together seven papers exemplifying the systems approach to educational decision making. The first discusses the need for inclusion of constituent values in educational decision making strategies to properly apply systems theory concepts. In the second, which addresses systems design for problem solving in schools,…

Since the publication of McREL's "2003 Annual Report," McREL staff members wrote more than 100 published articles in practitioner and peer-reviewed journals describing what they know from four decades of research on effective schools as well as years of practical experience working to help educators raise student performance: that…

This collection of papers, purposely written in jargon-free language, is designed to inform policymakers, business leaders, educators, and civic-minded parents about the abiding complexities of urban school reform and the linkages between the success of schools and the vitality of cities. After the "Introduction: Learning from the Past"…

This book examines the educational phases experienced by countries moving from authoritarian styles of government to various forms of liberal democracy. It focuses on Latvia, South Africa, and the former German Democratic Republic so as to identify commonalities in diverse systems. The essays employ a model that depends not on a regular linear…

To a greater extent than any other species, human beings create the environments that, in turn, shape their own development. This book endeavors to demonstrate that human beings can also develop those environments to optimize their most constructive genetic potentials. What makes human beings human, therefore, is both the potential to shape their…

The articles in this book examine educational privatization in Eastern Europe. The essays represent a variety of perspectives on education systems in various stages of evolution. The chapters are divided into three groups. The first three chapters discuss educational change and the privatization movement in the Baltic republics of Lithuania,…

This document is a compilation of eight papers which present the advantages of, and the need for, the systems approach in all areas of education. The first paper, an explication of the SIGGS theory model, explains set theory, information theory, and graph theory, and demonstrates their integration. Project PRIME, concerned with the mainstreaming…

Little current research focuses on the whole educational systems of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. Chapter 1, "The Educational Systems of the United Kingdom," points to shared cultural influences, broadly similar policy aims, and political, functional, and cultural interdependence to explain relatively modest…

This book presents 16 papers on assessment in higher education grouped into four sections on: first, systems approaches to assessment; second, the effectiveness of innovative assessment; third, assessing practice; and fourth, autonomous assessment. The included papers are: (1) "Institutional Strategies for Assessment" (Sally Brown); (2)…