The authors report on a yearlong investigation into similar schools that performed well and less well in the same district. They found that the higher-performing schools engaged in an intentional set of systemic practices that encourage Personalization for Academic and Social Learning (PASL) in one district and integrated structures of academic…

The conventional approach to scaling up educational reforms considers the development and testing phases to be distinct from the work of implementing at scale. Decades of research suggest that this approach yields inconsistent and often disappointing improvements for schools most in need. More recent scholarship on scaling school improvement…

The conventional approach to school implementation involves different sets of schools in designing, developing, and testing an innovation and yet another set of schools involved in implementation at scale. Decades of research suggest that this approach has yielded inconsistent and often disappointing improvements for schools most in need. More…

Background/Context: Mixed methods research conveys multiple advantages to the study of complex phenomena and large organizations or systems. The benefits are derived from drawing on the strengths of qualitative methods to answer questions about how and why a phenomenon occurs and those of quantitative methods to examine how often a phenomenon…

Market reforms in education are part of the educational policy landscape in many countries. Central to arguments for market reforms is the idea that competition and choice will spur changes in schools to be more innovative, which in turn will lead to better student outcomes. We define innovation in terms of a practice's relative prevalence in a…