The COVID-19 pandemic has provided educational stakeholders with an opportunity to reflect on our visions for healthy schools and how we can best organize schools to support these visions. Kristabel Stark, Neesha Daulat, and Simon King explain why teachers' emotional well-being matters for the health of school organizations and why the nature of…

As new school leaders take over the district's top jobs this fall, they and their communities face transitions. Joshua P. Starr explains that too many leaders focus on entry and fail to engage in a thoughtful and comprehensive transition process. Transition isn't just about change; it's also about loss. Organizational transition is about how…

Communities around the country are converging on a new approach to raising achievement for low-income children. This approach draws on two reform movements: (1) full-service community schools that provide wraparound health and social services to children and families, and (2) Prenatal through Grade 3 initiatives to improve quality, alignment, and…

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…

Unbundling is the process of deconstructing established structures and routines and reassembling them in new ways. It can occur as structural unbundling, which concerns the physical structures and delivery systems of schooling, or as content unbundling, which concerns the scope and sequence of what is learned.

Reformers hope that by unbundling schools--taking apart the current structures and routines and putting them together in new ways--we can create better schools. But there is no guarantee that it would improve schools in three areas that we know matter: coherence and infrastructure, the instructional core, and political accountability. However,…

To create and maintain continual improvement, school leaders must set goals, create strategies to reach the goals, and use checklists and rubrics in combination with regular communication between the district office and schools to ensure that everyone is staying on track. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

Three leading corporations, the Ritz-Carlton, Accenture, and Healthcare Corporation of America, were examined to see how they handled problems that also were faced by school districts. Their strategies for recruiting and retaining employees, measuring performance, and providing professional development differed significantly from those of most…

An educational researcher examines the trend toward ad hoc institutions. (Author)

Private tutoring is a growing industry that is being transformed by an evolution from "shadow education" provision into "learning center" franchises. Traditional shadow educators closely follow the school curriculum, offering short-term homework help and test preparation. Learning centers develop their own curricular and…

To conclude this special section, guest editor Murphy examines why Ed Schools should redesign their leadership education programs, explores what it will take to foster change, and presents a model program to stimulate debate and action. (Contains 21 endnotes.)

Ohme's Law is that the success of a plan does not necessarily depend upon its merit, but rather upon the right combination of leadership, plus client and practitioner involvement. (Author/IRT)

Summarizes findings from an in-depth study of improvement efforts in Chicago elementary schools, drawing on case studies of over 25 school communities, analyses of administrative records, and survey data gathered from 400 principals and 12,000 teachers. Of the schools most in need of change, one-third have developed strong democratic participation…

Means by which the high school can provide for its own self-renewal. (Author)

Based on the author's experience with the Atlas Community Project, this article identifies six different types of knowledge needed to mount a comprehensive reform effort: technical, resource, local, process, strategic, and organizational. Efforts to promote comprehensive changes do not necessarily make the reform processes markedly more successful…