This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of North Carolina's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. Delaware created new structures at the State level to support both State and LEA (local education…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Ohio's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. Prior to the first year of its Race to the Top grant, Ohio revised some Ohio Department of Education (ODE) job…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of New York's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. New York significantly increased its capacity to provide support to its local educational agencies (LEAs). At…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Rhode Island's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. According to the State, in Year 1, Rhode Island greatly increased statewide capacity to begin…

This State-specific summary report serves as an assessment of Tennessee's Year 1 Race to the Top implementation, highlighting successes and accomplishments, identifying challenges, and providing lessons learned from implementation to date. Tennessee received its Race to the Top grant in July 2010 as part of the first round of the competition.…

On December 7, 1988, the director of the Regional Pedagogic Centre of the Netherlands, Dook Kopmels, presented a workshop that focused on primary education in Ireland. Contents concerned: (1) official aims of primary education in Ireland; (2) responsibility for organizing primary education at national, regional, local, and school levels; (3) the…

The research discussed in this paper was intended to identify factors that promote or retard change in schools and to relate those factors to the modifications they foster. Data were collected from 13 Wisconsin elementary schools to determine what factors affect (1) the decision to adopt an innovation, (2) the rate of implementation of an…

This article reviews and analyzes the findings of a national study on school improvement. It defines four relationships important to effective implementation and the implications for school change. (MD)

Recent policy and program analyses conducted by our Center make it clear how few support staff are full participants at school and district tables where major school improvement decisions are made. It is not surprising, then, that student support staff are not appropriately accounted for in school improvement planning and implementation. This…

This document describes major examples of trailblazing and pioneering efforts that are playing a role in designing new directions for student support. The work is being carried out at school, district, state, and national levels. The endeavors are grouped into three categories: (1) places where broad-based systemic changes are underway, (2) places…

A companion report provided a summary of what was learned from surveys of principals and staff developers about the newly created position of staff developer in the middle schools of the San Diego City Schools, California. This study investigated the spring followup study that asked teachers what they thought about the new position and the work of…

Congress began funding the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) program in 1998 to stimulate whole school reform in low-achieving schools. Schools receiving CSRD funding are required to evaluate the reforms implemented and the student results achieved. In response to interest among educators and researchers, a national research…

Of more importance than any lofty concept of the principal's leadership are crucial, mundane, support functions--which can be carried out by supervisors and teachers as well as by principals. (Author)

Suggests that educational reform at the local level is often not implemented because of inadequate communication between politicians, planners, bureaucrats, and educators. Concludes that planners need to specify details of implementation, particularly the human dimension of that task and that senior bureaucrats must be brokers rather than…

Examined one school district's efforts to develop and implement a standards-based curriculum using rational and institutional perspectives. Findings show that the district took an expressly rationalistic approach in using standards, but lacking a clear instructional philosophy, the district also took an institutional approach. (SLD)