Houston Independent School District (HISD) strives to provide an equitable education to all its students. To uphold the district's mission, the Teacher Appraisal and Development System (TADS) was designed with the goal of promoting effective teaching by providing systematic, rigorous feedback on teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Through the…

This study focuses on the nature of the exclusive-inclusive profile. Given the tensions that exist between these forces at institutional level, much can be learned by examining the state of their relationship. In order for schools to be considered fully exclusive, for example, many will attempt to discourage everything that appears to threaten…

Houston Independent School District (HISD) strives to provide an equitable education to all its students. To uphold the district's mission, the Teacher Appraisal and Development System (TADS) was designed with the goal of promoting effective teaching by providing systematic, rigorous feedback on teacher effectiveness in the classroom. Through the…

Personalized learning (PL) has been internationally promoted as a future direction of educational reform efforts. While there is growing evidence of PL enhancing learning outcomes, teachers reported having difficulty envisioning PL in practice. This national survey study investigated how PL is practiced in K-12 learner-centered schools in the U.S.…

Scholarly learning has been and continues to be largely understudied and misunderstood; oftentimes scholarly learning is only studied in the context of research universities (Neumann, 2009a), thereby failing to acknowledge the ways in which faculty scholarly learning is enacted and supported across institutional types. In this monograph, the…

The charter-school sector in the United States has grown steadily since the first charter school opened in 1992 and nearly 7,000 charter schools currently serve nearly 3 million students. Research suggests that the average charter school performs about the same as nearby traditional public schools, but there is great variation in the effects of…

Teacher performance evaluation systems (PESs) are central to policy efforts to increase teacher effectiveness and student learning. We argue that for these reforms to work, PESs need to be treated as coherent systems, in which teachers perceive that there are linkages between the PES components. Using teacher survey data from a large, midwestern…

Particularly in mathematics, the transition from school to university often appears to be a substantial hurdle in the individual learning biography. Differences between the characters of school mathematics and scientific university mathematics as well as different demands related to the learning cultures in both institutions are discussed as…

To find out what is needed to speed up the adoption of open sharing and reuse of learning materials and open online courses in publicly funded Dutch institutions of Higher Education, a qualitative research study was conducted in fall 2016. This study examined issues of willingness of educators and management, barriers and enablers of adoption, and…

The article analyzes the possible causes of the degradation of certain public universities in Russia. On the basis of in-depth interviews with representatives of universities with deteriorating performance, certain external and internal causes of institutional degradation are identified.[This article was translated by Peter Golub.]

Schools have become the main provider of services to children with mental health needs. Although there is substantial literature on barriers to implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) in under-resourced school districts, less has been written on how to overcome those barriers. Providing mental health services in the school setting…

Global participation in international education in the last two decades has increased exponentially. International students face difficulties in adjusting to the culture of their host country due to their unique needs (Bertram, Poulakis, Elsasser & Kumar, 2014). This article presents themes comprising the international education phenomenon…

This meta-synthesis investigates the conditions that support teacher innovation in schools. Twenty-seven articles that report on studies using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodology were selected for this analysis. The articles were analyzed using Hargreaves's and Fullan's concept of "professional capital" as a…

In this HEPI paper, two authors with considerable expertise in evaluating higher education systems around the world assess higher education institutions that are not funded directly by taxpayers--known in the UK as alternative providers. Since the start of the century, alternative providers have been growing rapidly. This raises a number of…

The academic profession has encountered significant change over the past several decades, such as a higher priority on research; increasing enrollment of non-traditional students; the need to manage, advise, and instruct larger student bodies; and greater expectations to use instructional technologies (Gappa & Leslie, 1993: Geiger, 2011;…