To support systemic thinking about school improvement, the Center on School Turnaround at WestEd developed a framework to assist states, districts, and schools in leading and managing rapid improvement efforts. The framework, which is presented in this article, has four domains that have proved central to rapid, significant improvement: (1)…

We believe that reframing the conversation to creating a culture around health rather than focusing on discrete actions or activities will capture national consciousness and enable us to make new progress as a nation. Thus, in 2014, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) announced a new vision to help build a "Culture of Health" to…

As recently as five years ago, educators politely listened to, and largely ignored, suggestions that the world is changing at a dramatic rate and that education must adapt. Today, many educators agree that the traditional Industrial Age model of learning no longer adequately prepares students for their futures. As a result, many schools, and…

Over the last decade, a growing consensus has developed that for our nation's students to succeed in twenty-first-century economic and civic life, high school graduation is no longer sufficient. Labor-market analyses have shown that high-wage positions increasingly require postsecondary education and training, and students must now graduate…

Recently, there has been growing interest in adapting Return-on-Investment thinking to education--sometimes called educational productivity, or academic-ROI. Education leaders do not seek a monetary return on their spending, rather greater student learning, or other outcomes like student citizenship, higher graduation rates, or increased lifetime…

The commentaries to our target article "Towards a systemic theory of gifted education" differed in their assessments of the various arguments we put forward. Of the more than 40 responses to our target article, 27 responses were chosen as being representative of all commentaries. We grouped the responses according to the main points in our target…

In this target article, we argue that current approaches to gifted education are based on the erroneous view that to understand the development of exceptionality we need to understand firstly the components of giftedness, including cognitive such as intelligence and non-cognitive factors such as motivation. In contrast, systemic approaches to…

Citywide implementation of project-based learning highlights the benefits--and the challenges--of promoting exemplary practices across an entire out-of-school time (OST) network. In summer 2009, the City of Philadelphia and its intermediary, the Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC), introduced project-based learning to a network of more…

Merchandising and consumer economics traditionally have been part of family and consumer sciences (FCS) within the ecosystems framework. The purpose of this article is to examine progress of this sub-system within FCS. Specifically, the authors explore the relevance of the systems approach for merchandising programs and conclude that this model is…

Through special funding by the Ministry of Education and Science in 2008, the Research Institute for Higher Education (RIHE) at Hiroshima University has been able to implement a new research project on the reform of higher education in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century. RIHE hosted the third International Workshop on the Higher…

There is a clear conscience today that one of the dimensions of the crisis of education systems has to do with the crisis of the hegemonic models of how to teach and, above all, with the classic hegemonic definition of what to teach. There is also agreement about the fact that the great novelty of the times is that the nation is facing an…

This article challenges misperceptions about the definition of systemic change in school districts. While many contemporary change efforts are described as "systemic," in fact, they are not. The author also argues that a special instance of systemic change known as systemic transformational change is required to transform entire school…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the key aspects of transformation of universities towards sustainability, such as the ideal characteristics of the "sustainable university", and the drivers and barriers in the transformation, by comparing the strategies of seven universities world-wide. Design/methodology/approach: A…

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…

A group of human resource development (HRD) practitioners participated in an innovative session on managing culture in the e-workplace. The session objectives were as follows: (1) bring cultural patterns of the e-workplace to the forefront; (2) discuss the impact of culture on performance improvement in the e-workplace; and (3) share resources for…