Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students' long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee's statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences…

With a renewed commitment to systematic efforts as school leaders use multi-tiered systems of supports to meet students' multiple needs as educators navigate through the pandemic era, it is helpful to learn from implementers who screened successfully prior to the pandemic. This model demonstration paper features the experiences of four middle and…

Public schools have experienced an endless cycle of reform aiming to improve student achievement. Despite the time, funding, and resources that have been expended, most school reforms have not been successful at manifesting and sustaining meaningful change. New Jersey's latest attempt at school reform involved Regional Achievement Centers (RACs)…

Sustained inquiry between school administrators and mental health professionals around critical incidents, school policy, and problems of practice is required to mitigate inequities so prominently illuminated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collaboration between school stakeholders with different role identities and positionalities gainfully blurs…

In their nascent stages, charter schools formed under competing ideologies. In academic circles, charter schools were envisioned as pedagogical laboratories that would allow for educator- and community-driven school improvement. In other circles, charter schools emerged as a free-market reform driven by accountability, choice, and growth. Amid the…

This essay contends that personalized professional learning can support the shift towards a culture of personalized learning at the middle school level, with the potential to make a district-wide impact. If you have ever worked in a middle school, you would agree there is a sense magic and contagious energy within middle school students. Middle…

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) in basic education, i.e. K12 education, have often been constrained by sociocultural context and limited to pedagogical aspects, and these innovations have not yet catalyzed curriculum reform as expected. To address this research gap, this study adopted a key-competence-based subject knowledge…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to analyze educational changes, in particular transformational changes, and suggest a new approach to shift the paradigm in education using an ecological conceptual framework. Design/Approach/Methods: An ecological analysis of two key factors in education: prescribed curriculum and student autonomy.…

The present paper delves into how symbolic boundaries in a school that is undergoing a desegregation process come to shape social boundaries of 'we-ness' and 'otherness'. The theoretical framework of the study starts from an interest in analysing whether symbolic and social boundaries emerge in new encounters during a desegregation process and…

This study explored how principals who have experienced success in working with underrepresented students in STEM have challenged inequitable practices and transformed the culture of their schools so that all students can thrive. A purposeful sampling strategy was used to identify four principals who served as the cases for the study. The research…

School leaders Lydia Cochrane and Ayesha Hoda have struggled to meet the increasingly complex needs of the students in their schools. As students' needs increase, schools are asked to do more and more, while continuing to have strong academic results. Cochrane and Hoda believe the current system is untenable and needs to change. With Linda Nathan,…

This paper explores the use of a mediated field experience (MFE) for teacher candidates in a middle school setting, a small laboratory school. This work focuses on adjustments made for the MFE to function in an online environment during remote instruction caused by a worldwide pandemic. Teacher candidates completed a learning cycle focused on…

In the United States during March and April of 2020, more than 50 million K-12 students were impacted by school closures with many forced to engage in online teaching for continuity in their 2019-2020 school year. This disruption to K-12 public and private schools reverberated in programs of teacher education around the country. As…

In 2019, the four authors were teaching mathematics at the same public middle school in a suburban district of the mid-atlantic. They had been seeking ways to make adjustments to assessment and grading practices to support students in their learning, and after reading Joe Feldman's "Grading for Equity" (2018), they were inspired to make…

In an effort to advance the middle school movement, this paper examines the research trends from three organizations that support middle grades educational innovation, assessment, and research: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Educational Testing Service, and the Institute of Education Sciences. Using an instrumental, multiple case study…