Teacher education has been undergoing significant transformations worldwide in recent decades, and China has made continuous efforts in its quest for world-class teachers. This paper aims at a comprehensive investigation of the complex policy process in China's national initiatives to nurture a world-class teaching force, with qualitative findings…

The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (Baldrige categories) are increasingly being used throughout the health, education, and business sectors to drive continuous improvement in quality organizations. In each industry, specific categories are available to assist in identifying quality practices deployed throughout an organization. The…

As forty-six states and the District of Columbia implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), questions abound regarding implementation, including the implications for curriculum and pedagogy. In this report, researchers analyze what texts English teachers assign their students and the instructional techniques they used in the classroom. The…

Leadership is recently touted as a necessary skill for school counselors and as a means of aligning their work more intentionally with school improvement goals. By using leadership practices, school counselors can implement a program that addresses the academic, career, and personal-social needs of "all" students. This article outlines a…

This report outlines a 2-year investigation into how secondary science teachers used professional development (PD) to build scientific classroom discourse communities (SCDCs). Observation data, teacher, student, and school demographic information were used to build a hierarchical linear model. The length of time that teachers received PD was the…

People dislike the Common Core for several different reasons, and so it is important to disaggregate the sources of opposition and to assess and then to dispel some of the myths that have built up around it. It also is important to understand the unusual political alliances that have emerged in opposition to Common Core implementation and how they…

This paper reports on the findings of a pilot school-based professional development programme for Tanzanian primary school teachers launched in February 2011 and evaluated in December 2012 by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training with the support of UNICEF. The study set out to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of the pilot…

States, school districts, and schools across the country are increasingly implementing multi-tier systems of support (MTSS) to improve outcomes for all students. Kansas is no exception. The Kansas MTSS is designed to improve outcomes for all students by instituting system-level change across the classroom, school, district, and state. Such…

The Obama administration's Race to the Top competitive grant program initiated an unprecedented wave of state teacher-evaluation reform across the country. To date, most of the scholarly analysis of this activity has focused on the design of the evaluation instruments or the implementation of the new evaluations by districts and schools. But…

"The Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965" (ESEA) has directed federal resources to schools for more than four decades to help ensure all children have equal access to a quality education. The most recent reauthorization--or congressional update to the law--occurred with the passage of the "No Child Left Behind Act of…

This article analyses the relationships between different notions of education quality and policies on primary and secondary schools implemented in Argentina during the last two decades. The authors focus on three moments: (1) the emergence of the discussion about quality (at the end of the 1980s) in Latin America and in Argentina; (2) the…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) represent an unparalleled opportunity for students with disabilities. But this opportunity will be realized only if states, districts, and schools approach the implementation of these standards with forethought and careful planning, particularly for students with disabilities. The CCSS were developed for all…

Career-focused education offered through programs of study (POS), career pathways, and career and technical education (CTE) can provide students with opportunities to engage in career exploration and development, to establish career goals, to increase academic knowledge and skills, to test career preferences in applied settings, and to make links…

Citywide implementation of project-based learning highlights the benefits--and the challenges--of promoting exemplary practices across an entire out-of-school time (OST) network. In summer 2009, the City of Philadelphia and its intermediary, the Public Health Management Corporation (PHMC), introduced project-based learning to a network of more…

In a study of Ontario, Canada's province-wide Primary Class Size Reduction (PCS) Initiative, school districts' ability to direct and support schools was related to their experience with planning and monitoring, interest in innovation, and its human and fiscal resource base. Districts with greater "resource capacity" were able to…