The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives educators a fresh opportunity to think through how to ensure that all students achieve at high levels, especially kids from low-income families and kids of color. The new law continues with four principles that had been in earlier iterations, all of which have important implications for students from…

Teachers often start a new school year working extremely hard to reteach last year's content, particularly for their lower income students. According to "Making Summer Count," a report commissioned by The Wallace Foundation and written by researchers at Rand, rigorous studies of voluntary summer programs, mandatory summer programs, and…

This article deals with an action research project, where a group of university teachers from different disciplines reflected on and gradually extended their knowledge about how to support students' academic literacy development. The project was conducted within a "research circle" [Bergman, L. 2014. "The Research Circle as a…

In 2007, Tulsa Community College (TCC) joined the national Achieving the Dream (ATD) network, which is dedicated to developing data-informed interventions to increase persistence and completion among community college students. TCC's participation in the national initiative set it down a path for positive institutional change, but it was the…

Scott Hamilton is the Forrest Gump of education reform, although with a lot more IQ points and fewer chocolates. He worked for Bill Bennett in the U.S. Department of Education and for Benno Schmidt at the Edison Project. He authorized charter schools in Massachusetts, co-founded the KIPP network, quadrupled the size of Teach For America (TFA), and…

Through an illustrative example of Together We Achieve at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois, this chapter outlines an institutional approach for improving conditions for Black men on campus.

School improvement programs that work in some places don't work in others. School improvement programs that work with some students don't work with others. Programs that appear to have positive effects in the hands of some teachers don't work for other teachers. If we can't be confident that a program will travel well, from one…

Gender equality in and through education is critical to the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as many experts have observed, and investing in this area yields substantial public and private returns. It is a key driver of economic and social development and leads to gains in health, nutrition and many other areas. Support…

This paper reports the findings of an evaluative study of an initiative, in its sixth year of implementation, enhancing the learning and teaching of mathematics in 20 disadvantaged secondary schools in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa, twenty years after democracy. Findings highlight the importance of initial and ongoing professional development…

International development organizations increasingly use "participatory development" approaches to improve the effectiveness of their programs. Participatory frameworks are commonly limited in scope and funder-driven; these top-down approaches to participation have proven to be both ineffective, and at times, contradictory in their…

In early November 2013, the authors started talking about visiting the Hurley School, a dual-language school in Boston, Massachusetts. The Hurley School had spent considerable time transitioning to the Common Core State Standards on literacy, but little time addressing the shifts in math. They worried that math classes were no longer rigorous…

The Community College Pathways initiative consists of two pathways, Statway® and Quantway®, that accelerate post-secondary students' progress through their developmental mathematics sequence and a college-level course for credit. Launched in 2011, the Pathways have been remarkably successful, helping thousands of students achieve success in…

The California Collaborative on District Reform convened in Oakland for a two-day meeting, "Integrating Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning to Advance Equity and Achievement." The meeting explored methods to support and integrate academic, social, and emotional learning in K-12 education. Implementation efforts surrounding the…

In this paper, we describe the faculty development resources, structures, and processes utilized to promote educational scholarship in a department of pediatrics. We discuss a 5-year effort based on the strategy of forming an "academy" of educational scholars and resulting in significant increases in peer-reviewed conference…

Crystal Bonds is Principal at The High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, New York, NY. During her three years as a new principal at one of New York City's eight specialized high schools, she found herself constantly wrestling with two challenges: (1) Maintaining the school's high academic standards; and (2) protecting the…