American public higher education systems include the largest and most impactful colleges and universities in the nation, including 75 percent of the nation's public sector students. While their impact is enormous, they are largely neglected as an area of study and underutilized as an instrument for the improvement of postsecondary outcomes.…

Drawing on decades of research, policy, and practice, Jennifer A. O'Day and Marshall S. Smith show how strategies for pursuing educational quality and equal outcomes for all students can be linked, presenting an ambitious idea of the future of American education and a comprehensive theory of change for enacting that vision. The authors argue that…

Systems change literacy includes the willingness and ability to engage in collective action within and among system components, guided by long-term plans and measured by short-term, achievable "small wins." While potentially perceived as too "high level" or abstract, it can be helpful to consider that collective action occurs…

Roughly 30 years ago, American educators stood at a crossroads, with a decision to make about the future of education. With their ears ringing of warnings that they were facing a "rising tide of mediocrity" and recognizing unacceptable gaps in achievement between disadvantaged students and others, educators set off down a path of reform…

What does it take to transform a large, bureaucratic institution with a fractured culture and a compliance orientation into a nurturing, collaborative, vision-directed organization? In 2017, the California Department of Education's Expanded Learning Division (after-school and summer programs) took a radically different approach by cultivating the…

What does it take to transform a large, bureaucratic institution with a fractured culture and a compliance orientation into a nurturing, collaborative, vision-directed organization? This report and the accompanying research brief endeavor to answer that question by examining a humanistic and systems thinking approach to cultural change that took…

The theme of the 2016 National Conference of the Australian College of Educators (ACE), "Challenges and changes: The power of education to build the world to which we aspire," provided a unique opportunity for education professionals to carefully consider and propose papers, workshops, and poster sessions to stimulate discussion and…

In a perfect academic world, every college course would be reviewed and analyzed by its instructor, perhaps in conjunction with an instructional supervisor, upon completion of each semester to determine which techniques and strategies were most useful in helping students to learn course content. Those activities and strategies that were successful…

This report was written at the request of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Educational Service Center of Central Ohio, to inform the discussion of state-level policy makers and other stakeholders on how to improve the quality and cost-effectiveness of services provided to Ohio's students with special needs. It is critical for Ohio to find…

High-quality care in the earliest years of life has been shown to relate to positive developmental outcomes for children, including improved early academic skills, social-emotional competencies, and cognitive functioning. Unfortunately, the early care experiences of many children are not always high quality; rather, research suggests that…

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…

This Evidence Based Education (EBE) Request seeks to provide an overview of recent research regarding school improvement and reform with special concentration on turning around chronically low-performing schools. The response is divided into four main sections: Research on Effective Methods for Turning Around Low-Performing Schools, Frameworks for…

The history of American early care and education shows the episodic nature of the emphasis accorded young children. In the absence of any single focus, the profession is faced with multiple problems, multiple rationales, and multiple responses occurring simultaneously. Several new approaches to early care reform have been undertaken by different…

This paper presents an operational framework of change, derived from a synthesis of three change models. It is argued that to create a quality school, educators must use a model that helps participants internalize the components of the desired educational corporate culture. The organization must be examined in terms of the past, present, and…

Education reform, as a change process in daily teaching and learning activity, has never been easy. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a recent nationwide education reform initiative, demonstrates again that change is never easy and not always successful. As a matter of fact, "many innovations in education are either total or partial…