To an unprecedented degree, this is the era of educational entrepreneurship. Unconventional thinkers have waded into the world of K-12 education, founded influential organizations, and upended conventions. They have developed new models for delivering instruction or recruiting teachers and have applied old-fashioned practices with inspired…

The traditional way for parents to determine which public school their children will attend is as simple as looking at a map. But in some cases, what is the right campus from the perspective of school district planners is not the one desired by students or their parents. As school systems have embraced education reforms in recent years, some…

Neither school reform nor the focus on developing accountability systems that measure and evaluate the success of schooling are new or innovative educational practices. Even before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, many states had changed or were changing their accountability and assessment systems. Similarly, individual school…

An increasing number of state leaders have begun to grapple with one of the significant challenges of K-12 reform: how to substantially increase the percentage of young people graduating from high school while also continuing to bring academic standards into alignment with the skills and knowledge required for success in higher education and…

The subject of urban schools has received extensive scholarly and popular attention in recent years, and a wide variety of policies to address the problem of low educational achievement has been suggested. This article, based on an analysis of documents and reports, in-depth interviews, and a variety of secondary sources, examines the first…

Background/Context: Working theories about student goal orientation, understanding of intelligence, and affective mediation of task engagement inform current beliefs about students and learning and motivation. Much research has focused on identifying effective teaching strategies to raise the achievement of disadvantaged students; however, less is…

As we engage our students in social studies topics--whether at the college level or the secondary level--we are charged with promoting habits of mind and thought that produce our country's citizens. If we are doing our jobs, we are insistent about finding ways to connect the democracy in our classrooms with the democracy in our culture, and thus…

This paper presents information to be used by school-leadership teams engaged in the development of school-improvement plans. It reviews recent literature on shared leadership and collaborative schools, school-improvement teams, school culture, and effective schools/positive learning environments. The paper also identifies school-level and…

In 1990, Kent-Meridian High School in Kent, Washington, decided to implement four schools-within-schools, each with its separate academic and career focus. The first school, focusing on the area of health science, was implemented in 1992. A second school-within-the-school, the International Business and Global Studies (IBGS) School, was…

Since it is an acknowledged fact that school restructuring will not occur without the support and commitment of teachers, this study attempted to explore teachers' expressions of visionary leadership characteristics. Participants were selected from among teachers who participated in a four-day workshop on school restructuring. The sample consisted…

In the past 2 decades, the United States has had a more troubled experience in establishing common standards and decentralized authority than comparable school systems in other cultures. This paper describes how the National Center for Education and Economy (NCEE) has been working through the National Alliance (NA) for Restructuring Education to…

Vermont is working to reform its educational system, and, according to some assessments, improvements are being made. On average, Vermont's students write reasonably well and fourth graders perform better than national averages in mathematics on selected questions from the National Assessment of Education Performance. However, many students also…

In the early 1980s, a series of research studies reported that American schools had failed to produce literate and numerate graduates. This shortcoming was linked to the nation's declining economic position in the world marketplace, which led to a widespread, intensive school-restructuring movement. Drawing on multiple perspectives, the purpose of…

This paper seeks to tell and untell five stories about the notion of "policy hysteria." The first story, about developments in vocationalism in the United Kingdom over the last decade, serves as illustration for the second story, which is a critical analysis of vocationalist discourse. It is alleged that vocationalist discourse is made…

Current restructuring of education calls for more teacher involvement in the planning and delivery of instruction. This yearbook gives examples of teacher involvement as it updates the supervision process. Four sections include 13 essays by various authors. The first section is entitled "The Context" and includes four essays: (1)…