This commentary describes the limitations of 40-minute class period times. The forty-minute system makes hash of the lives of teachers, especially in small schools, and about 80 percent of high schools have fewer than two hundred pupils. These small schools crowd their forty-minute periods with as many diverse and unrelated activities as possible,…

Qualitative data offer advantages to evaluators, including rich information about stakeholders' perspectives and experiences. However, qualitative data analysis is labor-intensive and slow, conflicting with evaluators' needs to provide punctual feedback to their clients. In this method note, we contribute to the literature on rapid evaluation and…

Planning for policy implementation is as important as the implementation itself. A policy's intent can be subverted by the way the policy is implemented, or when unanticipated outcomes take precedence over the true intent. This article presents three cases of specific instances of unintended outcomes from policy implementation and presents a…

Drawing on the author's experience as director of a long-lived school-university partnership, this essay describes how one such organization can "do it right" and enhance the development of teacher leadership in schools. It also provides a cautionary tale about how that same organization can "do it wrong" and achieve the…

Three community colleges--El Paso Community College, Bunker Hill Community College, and Patrick Henry Community College--incorporated technology into the curriculum to support student progress in mathematics through developmental education. Each college took its own path: El Paso developed a self-accelerated emporium-style computer lab, Patrick…

Instructional design models have been criticized for being too inflexible and taking too long to follow to be useful in today's fast-paced environment. As a result, some have rejected instructional design. This article offers an alternative view of instructional design as flexible and able to be accomplished in much shorter time periods than…

Early years professionals wrote about changes in their settings as part of their MA studies, and reflected on the use of theories of leadership in implementing these changes. This article describes a documentary analysis of the scripts produced. Initially basing the study in current knowledge of leadership and change in Early Years settings, the…

This fall, the nine states that finished as runners up in last year's groundbreaking Race to the Top competition will have an opportunity to reapply for a grant. The winners will receive a combined $200 million to help implement the bold education reform plans they developed last year. Many of the eligible states already have clear roadmaps toward…

The process through which teachers transform the curriculum over time is best explained by incremental change theories. Teachers will tinker at the margins of the curriculum, effecting incremental change, until they begin to feel comfortable with the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, and they are willing to cede control of some curricular…

Studies of high-performing schools, where all students learn more than similar students in other schools, show common design elements. These elements are comprehensive, affecting the whole school, and include: (1) Clear mission guiding daily activities; (2) High, unyielding expectations that all students will learn; (3) Frequent monitoring of…

This book provides a valuable balance between what one must know and what one must do to turn around low-performing schools. The 3-E framework simplifies this complex process by focusing resources on the environment, the executive, and the execution of the turnaround plan. Central to each of these components is a spotlight on the values supporting…

The amount of time allocated for learning and the way that time is used is one of the few variables that can be influenced rather directly by school leaders. Fortunately, it is also a variable that has shown consistent links to student performance. Now that schools are focused directly, and in some cases exclusively, on student achievement, there…

The never-ending organizational challenge is to allocate available resources to best achieve its goals. Out of this fundamental question several models have evolved. One is a conceptual model--a way to think about how organizations operate. A second is a statistical model estimating the magnitude of relationships among goals and elements of the…

This article presents working definitions of efficiency, accountability, and quality, offering a framework in which an individual institution can make idiosyncratic use of these definitions, suggests tools for managing educational processes with respect to these three attributes, and presents examples of how institutions have improved efficiency,…

The University of Wisconsin-Stout, recipient of the Baldrige National Quality Award in 2001, developed a planning system that has evolved into a comprehensive and collaborative process for visioning, developing and implementing goals, and tracking university performance. This chapter describes the tactics that have contributed greatly to the…