Tennessee's State Board of Education developed Educator Diversity Policy 5.700 to promote the recruitment and retention of educators from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Accordingly, districts throughout the state develop annual diversity goals that reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of their student population and strategies for…

Change moves fast, and organizations can struggle to keep up. Mergers and acquisitions create new organizations, and managerial charts flatten, with fewer layers of administration in the middle causing people to be expected to do more with less. The optimal way to achieve critical outcomes is by scaling development opportunities across the entire…

To help admissions professionals achieve their diversity objectives, a strategy should be adopted that encourages universities to be more broadly self-reflective across a range of interrelated admissions policies and practices. Educational scrutiny is a data-analytic framework for campus-based understanding of the extent to which internal policies…

In this response, I applaud the work initiated in this research and underscore some of the key reasons I find it so valuable. Building from this, I also issue a call to the greater mathematics education community--particularly the large mathematics professional organizations--to consider the ways their organizations have conceptualized and framed…

To mark the 30th anniversary of "Campus Compact," leaders from across the network came together in the summer of 2015 to reaffirm a shared commitment to the public purposes of higher education. Campus Compact's 30th Anniversary Action Statement of Presidents and Chancellors is the product of that collective endeavor. In signing the…

Human competence is a vital element for any organization that expects to survive and then thrive. Developing individual performance ability is necessary but not sufficient because trained people alone will not make an organization successful. We must determine what people should deliver and why it should be delivered in order to add measurable…

In this article, Richard Lee Colvin, provides an uplifting history of the current vice president and next President of the National Education Association (NEA), Lily Eskelsen García, the first Hispanic head of the nation's largest union. Colvin describes Garcia as a powerful labor and political leader. Colvin describes NEA's beginning in 1857 by…

At the 1996 National Education Summit, a bipartisan group of governors and corporate leaders decided to create and lead an organization dedicated to supporting standards-based education reform efforts across the states. To do so, they formed Achieve as an independent, bi-partisan, non-profit education reform organization. This unique perspective…

The PASSAGE (Positive and Safe Schools Advancing Greater Equity) initiative in Chicago brought together representatives from Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the parent organizing group COFI (Community Organizing and Family Issues), and the youth education organizing group VOYCE (Voices of Youth in Chicago Education), facilitated by the Annenberg…

This paper is written for state educational agency (SEA) leaders who are considering the benefits of collaborative benchmarking, and it addresses the following questions: (1) What does benchmarking of best practices entail?; (2) How does "collaborative benchmarking" enhance the process?; (3) How do SEAs control the process so that "their" needs…

Given the newly refined ability to distinguish between teachers and their effectiveness, and the imperative brought on by the Common Core standards (CCSS) to deliver instruction at a more sophisticated level, it is no longer reasonable or tenable to keep treating teachers the same. Instead, school systems should provide their highest-performing…

In this article, the authors describe how they created a school library that is the center of learning in their school community with the collaborative vision of the principal (Mat McRae) and the school librarian (Kay Wejrowski) and the support of their entire staff. For eight years, McRae and Wejrowski have worked together as principal and school…

State education agencies (SEAs) are under fire and face new expectations from all sides. The federal government, state legislatures and governors, and citizens themselves are calling upon the SEA to do "more"--more to improve outcomes for students, more to close the achievement gap, and more to meet the diverse instructional needs of students.…

Announced by government in "New Challenges, New Chances" in December 2011, the sector-led Commission on Adult Vocational Teaching and Learning has been tasked with raising the quality, and improving the outcomes and impact, of adult vocational teaching and learning for learners and employers. It is a commission focused on the future--of…

The fishbone diagram developed by Mariano Bernardez (2009a, 2009b) in the introductory article to this issue of "Performance Improvement Quarterly" depicts the origins and interrelationships of the models and approaches of many fields and researchers that have contributed to human performance technology (HPT) as it is used today. We can…