The 21st-century job description for school principals requires greater areas of leadership and accountability utilizing student data to improve instruction as mandated by state legislative reforms. The Principal's accountability is measured using the principal evaluation system. The general problem is that many principal evaluation systems are…

Federal school accountability policies like No Child Left Behind were based on a logic that measuring school performance and making the results public through tools like school report cards would incentivize educators to create strategies for improving school quality. Yet, most schools needed more than incentives to be able to design improvement…

How are teachers experiencing the more rigorous teacher evaluation systems that many states have mandated in recent years? Donaldson, who has studied teacher evaluation reform over the past eight years, shares insights from a study of 14 Connecticut districts that have implemented the state's 2012 teacher evaluation reforms. In surveys and…

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) puts responsibility for improving student outcomes back where some say it has always belonged--under states' purview. No longer will prescriptive federal requirements dictate how states should identify, support, and turn around the lowest-performing schools and districts. Instead, states are empowered to craft…

This case study addressed the factors that enhanced or constrained the success of one Promise Academy at an elementary school in the northeastern United States. A large number of schools in an urban district have continuously failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP). The study school implemented the Promise Academy model in September 2010, to…

Reforms and changes in the public school system across the United States have affected all aspects of public school learning, governance, and the leadership roles of principals. This investigative, qualitative case study explored the educational reforms under Children First, a wide scale reform that re-ordered and re-designed the New York City…

Increasingly, colleges and universities across the country are adopting "guided pathways" reforms to create clearly defined, educationally coherent pathways into and through programs of study for their students. Facilitated by built-in supports, the goal of guided pathways is to increase learning and graduation rates, and to help more…

Administrator, teacher, and student perceptions of one-to-one technology were studied in a single case study approach at one rural Midwest high school. Interviews were conducted with six teachers, two administrators, and a survey was given to 185 student participants. The data collected indicated that while participants perceived success with the…

To prepare students for the flexible labour market of nowadays, schools are increasingly acknowledging their responsibility to guide students in their career development. The project "Career Orientation and Guidance in Secondary Vocational Education" was developed to encourage Dutch schools to initiate and/or continue the creation of a…

In response to the need for a scalable, institutionally supported model of educational change, the Science Education Initiative (SEI) was created as an experiment in transforming course materials and faculty practices at two institutions--University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and University of British Columbia. We find that this departmentally…

A study of two schools in northern Australia demonstrated the impact on Education for Sustainability (EfS) initiatives of a disruptive policy environment set in motion by neoliberal reforms focused on standards, accountability, and international competitiveness. In one of the schools, a culture characterized by trust and an emphasis on cultivating…

Strategies that encourage direct linkage and exchange between researchers and practitioners are more likely to support changes in educational practice informed by research evidence. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain in linking effectiveness education research to real-world practice: addressing the knowing-doing gap. The paper describes…

Purpose: This paper tries to propose a pedagogical training program starting from the Romanian mandatory curriculum for higher education (HE) teachers, integrating education for sustainable development (ESD) competencies (UNECE, 2012) through infusion as a technique of curricular design dealing with cross-curricular subject integration. The…

Science Course Curriculum was revised in Turkey in 2013 and some methods and strategies were suggested to be included such as argumentation. This study includes the evaluation of in-service training applied as pilot study for introducing argumentation to elementary school teachers. The study consists of applying needs analysis, preparing and…

Language teacher education programmes can be viewed as "change" programmes, particularly in their endeavours to re-shape cognition. However, often such programmes are found to be relatively ineffective in this regard. As a means of facilitating the desired change, trans-national language teacher education programmes, in which students…