The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to strengthen policies that support students and their colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos…

This commentary describes the limitations of 40-minute class period times. The forty-minute system makes hash of the lives of teachers, especially in small schools, and about 80 percent of high schools have fewer than two hundred pupils. These small schools crowd their forty-minute periods with as many diverse and unrelated activities as possible,…

There is no doubt that the American economy is in the midst of a major restructuring. While the consequences are not yet fully apparent, two powerful implications for higher education have become clear. First, because solutions to the nation's problems will require a highly educated work force, the demands on colleges can only increase. Second,…

Changes in education systems across Europe are a response to perceived needs to improve academic performance. The recent workforce remodelling agenda in England (2003-2005) reflected a growing concern that centralisation and the associated deskilling of teachers had gone too far. The resultant restructuring of the work of teachers, giving roles…

The focus of this report is on the functions of the curriculum coordinator in the Chelmsford Public Schools. The role of coordinator came into being as a response to a particular set of needs. An analysis of the changing nature of those needs provided a basis for deciding whether the coordinator role should be continued in its present form;…

Over the past two decades, scholars and practitioners in a variety of industries have considered work redesign among a constellation of strategies to promote employee recruitment and retention, development, motivation, and performance. Although educational policymakers in the middle to late 1990s shifted their attention to standards, systemic…

The world of work is composed of contradictory conditions which schooling tries to mediate through a reproductive process. The present organization of production based on wage-labor is inherently self-contradictory in that the interests of management and labor are directly opposed. School prepares individuals to deal with the types of peer…