Purpose: A growing number of school districts have recently added a position to the superintendent's cabinet, often titled chief equity officer. While the chief equity officer position is still in its early stages, we have an opportunity to examine insights from this work in the higher education context--both to support the adoption and…

Purpose: We examine the ways state education agency (SEA) and local education agency (LEA) leaders interpret and use educational policy to guide the provision of services for multilingual students classified as English learners (ELs) in their contexts. Our inquiry focuses on the external factors leaders describe that either enable or constrain…

Purpose: This study analyzed leadership structures, processes, and practices that have enabled and constrained an ambitious career and college readiness reform within an urban school district. It was designed to discern how leaders worked across cross-sector boundaries to support district-wide high school career academy implementation. Research…

Purpose: A common strategy used in school improvement efforts is a mandated process of formal planning, yet little is known about the quality of plans or the relationship between plan quality and implementation. This mixed-methods article investigates plan quality, factors associated with plan quality, and the relationship between plan quality and…

Purpose: This article seeks to enhance our understanding of the ever-present challenge of developing organizational capacity to implement complex education reform initiatives. We analyze the strategies in one large metropolitan education system used to address the district-level and site-level capacity challenges that surfaced as they implemented…

Purpose: Educator evaluation systems have recently undergone scrutiny and reform, and district and school leaders play a key role in interpreting and enacting these systems. This article uses framing theory to understand district leaders' interpretation and advancement of a state's new educator evaluation policy. Research Methods: The article…

Purpose: New teacher evaluation systems have expanded the role of principals as instructional leaders, but little is known about principals' ability to promote teacher development through the evaluation process. We conducted a case study of principals' perspectives on evaluation and their experiences implementing observation and feedback cycles to…

Purpose: Researchers and scholars have called for greater attention to collaboration among and between educational leaders in districtwide reform. This work underlines the important social aspect of such collaboration and further investigates the type of professional interaction among/between district and school leaders particularly around the…

Purpose: This study examines the outcomes of one regional intermediate school district's effort to promote literacy coach role implementation in its 20 constituent districts. The findings from this study provide information about the kinds of district-level contexts that influenced literacy coach role implementation and how those contexts were…

Purpose: Coburn's (2003) multidimensional conception of scale includes four interrelated dimensions--depth, sustainability, spread, and ownership--that provide a framework to understand scale at both the school and district levels. This study was conducted to understand how reform leaders in four districts implementing the National Network of…

Summarizes a study examining the high school principal's role in providing the leadership needed to explore and implement Project Re:Learning. The 4-phase study initially included 15 schools and involved questionnaires, interviews, and shadowing. Identifies six types of administrators: the absent administrator, the pawn, the pragmatic principal,…

Interviews were conducted with 26 classroom teachers to investigate their beliefs and attitudes about implementing integrated special education services for students with moderate and severe disabilities. Views toward integration focused on four aspects of the change: its purpose, clarity of implementation methods, effort required of teachers, and…

A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis support the proposition that tight cultural, structural, and interpersonal linkages in a school's organization increase the degree of implementation of new classroom practices. The three-year study involved 14 schools engaged in instructional improvement projects with an external…

Discusses 10 major school change strategies engaging the author's energy, beginning with training in group dynamics in the 1950s through today's emphasis on school restructuring. Other strategies included innovation diffusion and transfer, organizational self-renewal, knowledge transfer, creation of new schools, supported implementation, local…

Examines two reform efforts that indicate promising strategies for changing and improving urban school district decision- and policy-making systems, particularly as those systems reflect the relationships among boards of education, school superintendents, and the school district bureaucracy. (Author/IRT)