State Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS) can effectively support the improvement of school-age childcare programs by leveraging Program Quality Assessments (PQAs) alongside structured improvement planning and professional development. Real-world implementations in Arkansas, Michigan, and Pennsylvania underscore the impact and adaptability…

School improvement is an iterative process through which districts and schools develop their capacity, implement and refine new policies and practices, and respond to new developments and needs over time. School improvement policy can also be considered an iterative process, with policy implementors learning from previous rounds of a policy.…

Detentions and suspensions disproportionately affect children from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds, specifically Black children and children of lower socioeconomic status. These disparities in school discipline are addressed in a cognitive flexibility approach to professional learning through a privately funded district improvement…

Regardless of sector, implementation science and improvement science are used to support and improve the implementation and scale-up of evidence-based programs and practices. This brief highlights similarities and differences between implementation science and improvement science, as well as how they can be used together to support programs and…

All students deserve access to a high-quality education and the resources they need to thrive. However, in Michigan this has not been the reality for far too long, particularly for students who are the most underserved. Longstanding inequities have persisted and worsened since the beginning of the pandemic, and Michigan has fallen further and…

School choice policies have become a prominent feature of K-12 education in recent decades, reflecting the broader institutionalization of market-based political ideology in education. In this qualitative multiple case study, we draw on framing theory and interviews with 57 state-level education policy actors to explore the nature of the continued…

School choice policies have become a prominent feature of K-12 education in recent decades, reflecting the broader institutionalization of market-based political ideology in education. In this qualitative multiple case study, we draw on framing theory and interviews with 57 state-level education policy actors to explore the nature of the continued…

Purpose: As school districts evolve in their ability to actively support schools and educators, they must simultaneously contend with external policies that create additional demands on time and resources. This includes accountability policies aimed at increasing district and school capacity. This study uses Malen and Rice's (2004) dual dimensions…

In this study, we applied the technique of piecewise linear regression to a total of 144 schools with the third to fifth grades, aimed to search for a turning point at each grade level in terms of the effects of school renewal on school reading and mathematics achievement. We did find a turning point for each school subject at each grade level,…

This dissertation aimed to understand the level of staff engagement with the school improvement process before and after the implementation of a new continuous improvement model. To conduct this study, three questions were asked 1) How is the continuous improvement model working? 2) What is the change in staff engagement in the continuous…

State takeover has become a consistent policy prescription for school districts who become financially insolvent and/or have low academic achievement. A look at the state of Michigan's state takeover laws and the case study of Detroit Public Schools (DPS) demonstrates the negative consequences and nuances of the policy to improve academic…

Educational policymakers, leaders, and researchers are paying increasing attention to student attendance and chronic absenteeism, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though researchers have documented the consequences and causes of absenteeism, there is limited empirical evidence about what schools and districts are actually doing to…

Educational historians have established that progressive education was a multifaceted, diversified approach to education reform, and have recognized that such a variegated phenomenon is difficult, if not impossible, to define. Instead, historians attempt to capture the complexity of progressive education either by articulating its principal…

This descriptive study investigated the transformational redesign method of school improvement as implemented in the 2014 cohort of Michigan Priority schools. In Michigan, schools appear in a top-to-bottom ranking published by the Michigan Department of Education according to their proficiency achievement percentile; each year the schools falling…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…