This policy-interested South Australian public education case study problematises how the Chief Executive (CE) and members of the Education Department's Senior Executive Group (SEG) understood system and school improvement from 2018 to 2022. We applied Carol Bacchi's, "What's the Problem Represented to be?"(WPR) policy analysis framework…

Data is ubiquitous and inseparable from the human experience. It constantly informs and transforms interactions, decisions, and understanding. If the total amount of all the data created daily was printed on paper, it would fill a library the size of 110 Libraries of Congress. As a senior research consultant for an education market research and…

Purpose: There is a growing interest in showcasing what building school capacity looks like empirically. Although there has been considerable focus on school reforms globally, the actual impact of such attempts on building school capacity, particularly in a non-Western context, remains less explored. This paper aims to illustrate the process of…

Districts and schools constantly troubleshoot and mitigate new and ongoing challenges. Rather than addressing each challenge ad hoc, they are looking to adopt a systematic, repeatable process proven to diagnose and respond to challenges efficiently and effectively. One such approach with wide application and use in education is a Networked…

Coaching is a popular and high-leverage instrument for instructional reform. Coaching holds potential to accelerate teacher learning and school improvement. Linking results from current research, we portray how coaching benefits from robust infrastructure. This article offers three design recommendations that leaders can implement to optimize…

Background: As summarized in this article, the widespread implementation of modern school health education (SHE) could become one of the most effective means available to improve the well-being of people in the United States and in other nations. However, the development and evolution of SHE largely remains unorganized, underdeveloped, and…

Interest in improving civic education is growing, but there's no clear definition of what civic education should be. To understand what kinds of skills civics education should promote in students, Jack Schneider, Eric Soto-Shed, and Karalyn McGovern surveyed 100 experts and 500 ordinary citizens, asking them to name the tasks that skilled citizens…

In June 2024, His Majesty's Chief Inspector of Education announced a national thematic inspection of local authorities in Scotland. The focus of this thematic inspection was how local authorities support schools to improve. This inspection provides a timely opportunity to reflect on strengths, challenges, and opportunities for ensuring…

Recent articles have introduced ideas from Physics, specifically, negentropy, to the social sciences. Applications have been primarily in higher education, online learning, and organizations. This article applies negentropy to PK-12 school contexts, discussing the principles for application of systemic school reform and improvement. Negentropy is…

In "Getting Education Right," Rick Hess and Mike McShane argue that America has too long suffered from the absence of a robust, coherent, and principled conservative vision for educational improvement. The book both diagnoses a problem and offers a solution. The problem? The right has too narrowly focused on school choice, campus speech,…

The purpose of this study was to examine the presence of continuous improvement and improvement science in the Consolidated State Plans required by ESSA. Through an exploratory qualitative content analysis, we examined 52 state plans to determine the extent education policies encourage professional educators to use a continuous improvement and…

The purpose of this study was to understand the deciding factors of teachers who have accepted a teaching position, or continue to remain in a teaching position, in rural K-12 public schools in central Illinois. Staffing a school of fully qualified teachers remains one of the most important and difficult challenges to school districts throughout…

The purpose of this study is to examine the network effect of school principals as it relates to school improvement. Network practices of school principals are compared to an innovative practice for improving networking practices. Through descriptive statistics and chi-square goodness of fit, we illustrate the difference between what school…

Ideas about educational improvement are contextual and contested. This study proposes a critical and pragmatic framework to analyse systemic improvement, taking into account the paradoxes and limitations of quantitative sources. The study compared 83 subnational educational systems of three federal countries in Latin America: Argentina, Brazil,…

Resources for school improvement efforts, such as school improvement plan (SIP) templates, can espouse governmental entities' perspectives on and requirements and recommendations for the school improvement planning process. These resources, in turn, can influence how educators enact school improvement efforts generally and the school improvement…