Latest research suggests that the most effective methods on education are those which utilize technological tools that provide an interactive approach to learning. Exploratory technology which involves augmented reality applications in the regular school program, gives the opportunity to young learners to become autonomous and active in their…

Policymakers and practitioners at the local, state, and federal levels have invested considerable time and energy into solving the problem of turning around chronically low-performing schools. As the U.S. Department of Education (the Department) has refined the federal effort to support states and districts to turn schools around, it has adopted…

This longitudinal (2013-17), exploratory, mixed methods case study of a small, secondary school in a high poverty neighborhood located in a major northeastern city, investigates the changes in leadership practices and essential organizational structures during several phases of an improvement effort, supported by a federal School Improvement Grant…

The UChicago Consortium, Network for College Success, and the To&Through Project's new paper, "Practice-Driven Data: Lessons from Chicago's Approach to Research, Data, and Practice in Education," shares key lessons learned from Chicago's approach to using data to foster ongoing improvement in students' educational attainment. This…

This policy brief examines new ways that US public school districts are organizing and managing instruction, ways that family and community organizations can engage those efforts, and ways that states can support them in doing so. In a complex education reform landscape, understanding the different ways districts are reforming instructional…

Value-added models are being implemented in many states in an attempt to measure the contributions of individual teachers and schools toward students' learning. Scores from these models are increasingly used for high-stakes purposes such as setting compensation, hiring or dismissing teachers, awarding tenure, and closing schools. The statistician…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is for the author to recount how his use of organizational theory to understand educational reform in the USA led to a change of mind. Design/methodology/approach: My shift resulted from my conclusion, derived from the new institutionalism, that only marginal changes can be made in schools and, thus, fundamental…

Tenure is intended to protect teachers with demonstrated teaching skills against arbitrary or capricious dismissal. Critics of typical tenure processes argue that tenure assessments are superficial and rarely discern whether teachers in fact have the requisite teaching skills. A recent reform of the tenure process in New York City provides an…

The theory and tools of "improvement science" have produced performance improvements in many organizational sectors. This essay describes improvement science and explores its potential and challenges within education. Potential contributions include attention to the knowledge-building and motivational systems within schools, strategies…

Aspiration has come to play a central role in the British government's approach to educational underachievement. This article revisits research conducted in the 1970s by Paul Corrigan and Paul Willis to examine the impact of neo-liberalism on the school life of young teenagers. The behaviours of working-class children as described by Corrigan and…

In this article, I put forth a framework for thinking about how contexts matter. This framework highlights organizational, occupational, personal, and social contexts that influence leadership, which I illustrated with three cases of superintendents working on issues of systemic, equity-focused improvements. Data are drawn from a seven-year study…

This study sought to discover how one high school principal sustains a context for continued improvement through PLCs using case study methodology. Schools comprised of PLCs allow educators to grapple with the unique needs of their students in their specific contexts. The problem is that there is limited literature and research to indicate how…

Educators often shy away from evaluating professional learning experiences because they believe the process requires knowledge and skills they don't possess. As a result, they either neglect evaluation procedures completely or leave them to "experts" who come in at the end and gather data to determine if anything made a difference. But…

The purpose of the article is to justify the increasing role of a university department in achieving the major objective of higher education, namely to train highly qualified specialists for the national economy. The article contains some of the results of monitoring (questionnaire) of 350 heads of departments of Russian universities, as well as…

This study analyses the functioning of a school as a social system in an atypical context with the purpose of generating propositions to tackle educational problems confronted by socially and economically disadvantaged groups attending these schools. Adopting the constructivist grounded theory, the analysis suggests that there is a kind of…