The primary purpose of this guidebook is to support a learning community that promotes the growth, quality, and sustainability of Community Schools across Wisconsin. This document provides an overview of Community School models and supports, including: a list of the current districts implementing Community Schools in Wisconsin; information on how…

To protect human subjects to the fullest extent possible, stakeholders must make time to reflect as well as engage in continuous-improvement efforts regularly using a rigorous framework. At one completely online university that primarily grants graduate degrees, stakeholders informally expressed complaints relating to various policies and…

International indicators show that Finland has one of the most educated citizenries in the world, provides educational opportunities in an egalitarian manner, and makes efficient use of resources. But at the beginning of the 1990s, education in Finland was nothing special in international terms. The performance of Finnish students on international…

Governments frequently introduce education policy reforms to improve the educational outcomes of pupils. These often have simultaneous effects on pupils because they are implemented in the same schools and at the same time. In this paper, we evaluate the relative and multiple overlapping effects of two flagship British educational policies--the…

The nation is in an era of policy reform aimed at improving the productivity and effectiveness of higher education. Major philanthropies and policy groups have converged around variations of the ambitious college completion goals announced by President Obama at the beginning of his administration. But at the same time, many state governments,…

In August 2009, the U.S. Department of Education announced opportunities for states and local educational agencies to vie for $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement Grants targeted at turning around or closing down chronically low-achieving schools. To qualify for a portion of these funds, school districts were required to implement one of…

This qualitative study identified the best practices utilized by community colleges to achieve systemic and cultural agreement in support of the integration of institutional effectiveness measures (key performance indicators) to inform decision making. In addition, the study identifies the relevant motives, organizational structure, and processes…

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), also known as the stimulus package, appropriated $100 billion for education and included $3 billion for school improvement grants (SIGs) to help reform low-performing schools. This amount was in addition to the $546 million provided by the regular fiscal year 2009 appropriations bill for…

Throughout the world, the demand for higher education is increasing exponentially, pushed forward by the realities of a global economy and accompanied by pressure to open up opportunities for prospective students from all backgrounds. The importance of a knowledgeable, highly skilled population has become clear and many countries have made great…

The National Early Childhood Technical Assistance Center (NECTAC) was charged by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) from 2001-2006 to develop, implement, and evaluate an approach to technical assistance that would result in sustainable systems change in state Early Intervention and Preschool Special…

In this article, we review research from the organizational sciences to develop lessons for educators and policy makers. The approach is an integrative review of the literature. We employ a comprehensive process to unpack and make sense of the turnaround literature from the organizational sciences. We rely on strategies appropriate for document…

Results-based management (RBM) is an approach to programme planning and management that integrates strategy, people, resources, processes and measurements to improve decision-making, transparency and accountability. The Commonwealth of Learning (COL) began the adoption of a RBM model with its 2003-2006 Three-Year Plan. This led to a significantly…

Every year, new teachers collectively spend about $4.8 billion on their training requirements, nearly all of which goes to teacher preparation programs. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether that is money well spent. Despite decades of research and ongoing calls to improve the quality of teacher training, we still do not know how to sculpt an…

In 2006, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched the Early Learning Initiative (ELI) to improve the school readiness of Washington State's children through three main strategies: (1) development of high-quality, community-wide early learning initiatives in two communities; (2) enhancement of statewide systems that support early…

To encourage a greater policy discussion of the complexities of implementing major school improvements on a large scale, this report (a) discusses the need to expand school improvement planning to address how schools and districts will accomplish necessary systemic changes, (b) outlines some basic considerations related to systemic change, and (c)…