This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the…

Fifty years after the production of Circular 10/65, which confirmed comprehensive education as the national policy for secondary education in England and Wales, it is possible to trace the idea of comprehensive education from the 1940s to the 1960s, to understand the position of the Labour Party in its development, and to assess the nature of the…

This study explored complicated personal narratives of school reform generated by participants in response to a particular small schools reform initiative. Narrative data was dialogically generated in interviews with nine past participants of an urban high school conversion project planned and implemented over a span of five years toward the goal…

This study draws from 4 years of qualitative case study data to describe how programmatic and district factors interacted to affect reform sustainability in two school districts--one urban and the other suburban. These districts have been implementing a reform developed by the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) for over a decade. NNPS…

Interest in setting high educational standards is at the forefront of many school reform programs in the United States. States' pursuit of high standards can be advanced through implementation of programs such as High Schools That Work ("HSTW"), which emphasizes high expectations and rigorous academics for all students, including Career…

Framed by sociocultural learning perspectives, this study examines whether embedded learning opportunities for teachers are more supportive of reflective practice than traditional professional development. All schools in this study implemented a comprehensive school reform program. The designs of the programs introduced embedded learning…

The authors conducted a third-party study of the student achievement effects of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform (CSR). The design was a quasiexperimental, pre-post matched sample (N = 180) with school as unit of analysis, drawing on 3 years of achievement data from standardized external assessments.…

The present study describes students flows before and after the latest reform of upper secondary school in which a third year as well as a new grading system and new entrance requirements were introduced in vocational programmes. Published and unpublished data on student flows through upper secondary school before and after implementation of the…

This report discusses low-performing school districts identified by the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL). It is based on a 5-year contract in which SEDL tried to transform low-performing schools in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas into high-performing learning communities. The first part of the paper…

In the 1970s, comprehensive secondary schools were mandated in England. This article reports a study of the effects of reorganization on seven East Midlands secondary schools. From interviews with administrators, information was collated concerning curricular changes occurring since reorganization, the formal organization adopted, and internal and…

Interviews with 160 experienced and less-experienced teachers in northern England at a time of upheaval in the British school system documented (1) the destruction of experienced teachers' career timetables, their disillusionment, and motivational crises; and (2) the highly motivated career building of beginning teachers. (SK)

The relationship between inservice education and educational change in a large comprehensive secondary school is examined. Teachers contrasted inservice education with other professional activities and assessed the usefulness of each in the development of the school's curriculum. (Author/JN)

This descriptive study investigated two areas: (a) perceived changes in gifted and talented (G/T) programming in Iowa from the time a state mandate was implemented to the time of the study, and (b) perceived effects of the mandate on G/T programming in Iowa. Perceptions of middle-level teachers of gifted and talented students (n = 111) were…

The first in a series of annual interim reports on the federally funded Experimental Schools (ES) program, this report describes the first 2 years of a 6-year research program designed to promote locally-initiated comprehensive educational change dependent upon community participation, with provision for systematic documentation and evaluation.…

The panel provides an overview of the factors most influential in shaping the American high school as it exists today and recommends (1) replacing the comprehensive high school and providing comprehensive education; (2) establishing participatory education involving adolescents and other interested adults in the community; (3) establishing small,…