The University of Rochester and East High School in Rochester, New York, entered into a partnership in 2015, hoping to transform the school to prevent shut down by the state. Both partners were wary because of the district's failed attempts at reform and the history of similar partnerships elsewhere. A new state-level reform option allowed the…

A group of New York City public school teachers, angry about the depiction of public schools in 'Waiting for Superman," decide to make their own film about the realities of the current education reform movement. They persevered even though they had no budget when they started and lacked a background in filmmaking. "The Inconvenient Truth…

An intriguing experiment is afoot in some of the nation's struggling public schools. New "Parent Trigger" laws passed in California and on the agenda in New York, Ohio, Colorado, and Chicago, allow parents of chronically failing schools to unseat the schools' leadership and staff. But the initiative has pitfalls. It's easy to mobilize…

Conventional thinking holds that districts and schools face a strategic decision between two fundamentally different alternatives: make or buy? The former refers to planning, designing, and enacting school-specific improvement initiatives. The latter refers to contracting with external providers of schoolwide improvement programs. However, there…

In this, the second installment of a two-part report of the 46th annual PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, the report unveils what Americans are thinking about public schools--in particular their views of teachers and the classrooms where they work. Some findings were surprising, others were not. For example,…

In Newark, N.J. the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) reform plan is developing a comprehensive school reform strategy. Operating in seven schools in Newark's Central Ward, BBA has introduced school-based interventions that are responsive to the issues and challenges. Through these interventions, social services, and a concerted effort to increase…

Instead of doing less with less during these fiscally challenging times, school districts can seize the moment to usher in school transformation that will leave the schools, families, and communities better off. They could follow the lead of districts such as Baltimore City, Syracuse, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg to think outside traditional cost…

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 take unbundling or any reform wisely, we need to focus on what we're asking people to do and why, what it would look like to do it, and how we expect our actions to lead to particular results. Unbundling, like other reforms, will work well for some students and not for others.

When "A Nation at Risk" appeared in 1983, everyone saw school reform through a lens of preconceived ideas about teaching and learning, and every part of the land of education reacted differently to the report. Some saw the problem as "bad teachers," which immediately raised the question of "bad schools of education" where they were trained.…

The principles that drive No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are fundamentally flawed, and though it might achieve some good in the Third World conditions of America's worst schools, in places accustomed to success, performance levels will inevitably decline as all concerned discover that mediocrity has become the new excellence. This is a lesson the…

When the National Commission on Excellence in Education submitted "A Nation at Risk" to Secretary of Education Terrel Bell on 26 April 1983, there was little to suggest that this report would shine a spotlight on education that would last a quarter of a century. Indeed, not long after the release of this document, critics were already…

Educators often pretend to be on the verge of revolutionary change, when they are simply using inflated language to disguise the laborious, slow-moving character of school improvement. Real school improvement occurs when practitioners search for and experiment with solutions to their real-life, day-to-day problems while being open and honest about…

If school leaders are to bring about successful reform, they must thwart the forces that have conspired against it since the 19th century. In this article, the author identifies six "conspirators" against thoughtful school practice and offers practical suggestions for rooting them out. The six conspirators are: (1) The tendency to view schools as…