Our research-practice partnership (RPP) focused on developing and testing metrics and tools to foster improved evidence-based budgetary decision-making. We expected our research findings to directly influence decisions about program expansion, contraction, or elimination. Instead, unexpected findings led to unexpected uses: changes in program…

This article focuses on contemporary federal education policy as it manifests in rural schools. Rural schools differ appreciably from nonrural schools in terms of organizational systems, structures, and culture. Federal policies that drive school improvement initiatives (e.g., those regulating the functioning of schools and those managing the…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change.This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

Examines the relationship between meaningful program implementation and capacity to assess the impact of James P. Comer's School Development Program in a large-scale study, describing how the impact study became an implementation study because of such factors as changes in study design, disappearing treatment, difficulties implementing randomized…

Federal education policy should: (1) define objectives and targets of its activities more precisely; (2) define minimal conditions of organizational performance; (3) distinguish among sources of variability in state-local program implementation; and (4) specify the relationship between strategy and structure. (CJ)

In January 2004 President Bush authorized the DC School Choice Incentive Act, an initiative funded at $14 million that created a scholarship program providing 1,700 low-income Washington, DC, children the opportunity to attend participating K-12 nonpublic schools in the district. In addition to offering opportunities to participating children, the…

Fiscal and programmatic controls that have been applied to different types of federal grants are described. It is suggested that a simplification of grant program structure is necessary to establish priorities and ways or controls to pursue these priorities. (CJ)

The problem of differential and uniform treatment of states, from the federal government's point of view, is examined, including the federal role and the various instruments available for achieving federal purposes. State governments' perspectives are also examined, including ways in which states differ, implementation of federal policy, and…

Federal policy has been unsuccessful in achieving some of its goals for several reasons, including viewing implementation as an act rather than as a process and assuming that organizations have uniform capacity and willingness to implement policy. A strategy of differential treatment that matches implementing organizations' characteristics is…

This article presents brief portraits, cameos, of the implementation status of New Information Technology programs in the member countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) and 5 non-European countries. It concludes with a description of the EEC Summer University, a cooperative software development laboratory which produced 13 educational…

This article describes the development and implementation of a district-wide plan by the Columbus (OH) Public Schools to integrate computers into school programs. Included is a discussion of Summer Tech, a community education program to provide high-quality, low-cost computer education to the entire community. (IAH)

This issue of "Peabody Journal of Education" is devoted to a study of one metropolitan school district's attempts to implement Public Law 94-142 beyond satisfying the law's requirements to real changes in services. Chapters cover: (1) background, enactment, and implementation of the law; (2) the school system; (3) elementary schools; (4)…

Future federal education policy should shift from complex, detailed regulations to broader grants of authority to state governments, with clear guidelines that specify national goals. Past federal activities, classified as distributive, regulatory, or redistributive, are reviewed to assess factors indicating effectiveness. (CJ)