The need for change in the education system is obvious and overwhelming. But each stakeholder group has its own ideas about why the system is broken and how to fix it. Competing priorities, political inertia and diminishing budgets maintain the dysfunctional status quo. This essential text examines the underlying causes behind the key challenges…

The Investigating Quality (IQ) Project was conceptualized as a multiple systems approach to transforming early childhood education, care, and development (ECE/ECD) in British Columbia, Canada. Those systems extended from provincial government to local programs, from innovative policies to new approaches to practice. Fortunately, the tenure of the…

The last two decades have seen fast-moving and wholescale changes in the ways that education is now provided in French schools, in the nature of learner assessment, and in the form and scale of system evaluation. Innovation and reform have in part followed international trends, themselves triggered by the global impact of the international…

This paper presents the experience of going to scale of "Escuela Nueva," an educational innovation that started in Colombia and has influenced educational policy in several countries around the world during the last 30 years. The paper is based on the experience of the leaders of the innovation and its expansion over time. As an…

The notion of complexity--as in "education is a complex system"--has two different meanings. On the one hand, there is the epistemic connotation, with "Complex" meaning "difficult to understand, hard to control". On the other hand, complex has a technical meaning, referring to systems composed of many interacting…

Assignment of ESEA Title III monies to State agencies mandates a research model for needs assessment to facilitate interstate comparisons and generalizations. Theoretical postulates for and empirical evidence from the Virginia Needs Assessment Project suggest a prototype design, moving in three phases from ideas into program outcomes. Phase I…

Nineteen geographically distributed secondary schools were linked with research and development resource groups for the purpose of implementing a 5-year learner-centered curriculum. The ultimate goal was to have each of the schools serve as a demonstration center for regionally continguous school districts. The changes attempted were the products…

This case study describes the introduction and consideration of a state board staff proposal that the more traditional Minnesota State Universities adopt external degree programs. A model for making practices congruent with policy decisions is presented. The process of examining the external degree proposal, beginning with the state board actions…

As the focus on school improvement at a state education agency moves from mostly a compliance approach to playing a greater role in capacity building, the agency's leadership needs to rethink student and learning supports. That is the focus of this report. Given that almost half of the chief state school officers have assumed their position in the…

It is time for reform advocates to expand their emphasis on improving instruction and school management to include a comprehensive component for addressing barriers to learning. In doing so, they must pursue this third component with the same level of priority they devote to the other two. That is, such an enabling (or learner support) component…