When teachers at Thomas Gardner Elementary School voted in fall 2003 to join Boston's network of "pilot" schools, they had no inkling of the political firestorm that lay ahead. A few months after they moved to become part of the city's nationally watched experiment with small, autonomous public schools, the president of the Boston Teachers Union…

America's urban high schools are having trouble making sophomores, resulting in freshmen classes bulging with students repeating a grade. Research shows that these students are at high risk of failure and dropout. Urban districts have begun to respond to the notable "freshmen bulge" through school restructuring. This mixed-methods study…

This paper provides information about strategies that high poverty urban elementary schools have used to initiate major reforms in their processes and structures and to share the process used to elicit information from these schools. A research study analyzed the experiences of six high poverty urban elementary schools in Massachusetts, New York,…

This two-part document reports on the summative, district-level evaluation of 33 Dade County (Florida) schools that participated in a 3-year pilot School-Based-Management/Shared Decision-Making (SBM/SDM) program, and describes the operation and impact of selected innovations operating in some of the schools. Evaluation information was drawn from…

This evaluation of the first-year elementary school implementation of Boston's pilot "controlled choice" student assignment plan found that very little had been accomplished in planning for school improvement and that future desegregation compliance hinges on key decisions about secondary and bilingual education, and the empowerment of…

Three programs sponsored by the Seattle (Washington) public schools' Office of Academic Achievement were evaluated: the Academic Achievement Project, Early Childhood Model (ECM) Schools, and Pilot Projects. Academic Achievement projects were designed to increase the academic achievement of at-risk learners and to decrease disproportionality. The…

This report examines the efficacy of the Boston Pilot Schools, a model of urban schools created in 1994 to promote innovation and increased choice options within the Boston Public Schools (BPS). Unlike most urban public schools, the Boston Pilot Schools have control over budget, staffing, curriculum, governance, and time, all critical conditions…

In 1988 the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld a previous decision that the state public education system had failed to provide an efficient system of common schools. The Kentucky Educational Reform Act (KERA, 1990) came from this decision. This paper reviews the restructuring of a primary school under the KERA, focusing on one collaborative effort…

This paper describes a 1993-94 pilot program in Memphis (Tennessee) that was developed to increase the number of minority students prepared for, matriculating to, and graduating from postsecondary institutions. The communitywide partnership of institutions that implemented the program is described, along with the needs assessment commissioned by…

An ethnographic study was conducted of the first year of implementation of the Accelerated Schools Project in a pilot middle school. The interaction between intervention and the existing school culture is studied through multiple interviews with teachers, support staff, administrators, students, and parents as well as observation and review of…