School improvement can be a complex, messy business. At its most basic, school improvement is change--change that might require people to abandon long-held beliefs and practices, shift roles, and learn new skills. Kilgore and Reynolds (2011) suggested that successful change requires that people change their perceptions as well as their actions.…

Response to Intervention (RTI), an approach to systematically addressing the needs of struggling students, has been used primarily at the elementary school level. However, both its intent and its elements can also be used successfully in high schools. This "Informed Educator" describes what RTI is, as well as what it is not, highlights core…

Data use and decision-making--these two phrases have appeared together in probably hundreds of education articles and have been the topic of a host of presentations during the past decade. In addition, research studies have confirmed the importance of data-informed decision-making to school improvement. Thus, school leaders have found it makes…

A principal may have implemented a program that boasted glowing reports but didn't live up to its promise. The cause of this disparity could be that the program didn't match the school's and students' needs in terms of the curricular focus or that previous results were more positive than warranted. However, another possibility could be that the…

Class-size reduction (CSR) has been a complex and contentious issue for the last quarter century. Although the small-class concept was adopted because it appealed to common sense, research over time has revealed a mix of confounding variables, instead of a definitive conclusion. Some CSR efforts, such as Tennessee's Project STAR and Wisconsin's…