Inquisitiveness is what drives children's learning. Cognitive scientists have devised constructivist theory to explain how an individual progresses from curiosity to new knowledge. Formal schooling has struggled unsuccessfully to simulate real-life learning situations. Emerging brain research supports bringing the community into the learning…

In Prince George's County, Maryland, Superintendent Jerome Clark told staffs of low-performing schools to resign and reapply for positions. New principals were hired, and schools were restaffed. San Francisco has experimented with reconstituting or jumpstarting dysfunctional schools since the 1980s. A Department of Education study shows mixed…

Immediately following the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, the issue of school size jumped onto the front pages and into policy discussions. When violent episodes broke out in Littleton, Colorado, Port Huron, Michigan and in other districts, they have dominated the national media scene for months in a way that student deaths in…

This article applies Foucault's notion of governmentality to educational restructuring in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the nature of government in a modern state entails engaging with particular practices and domains of knowledge, which themselves constrain the changes that are conceivable and credible. Using Foucault's concepts of…

In spite of the emphasis in public policy and the professional literature on developing inclusive programs for students with disabilities over the past 30 years, surprisingly little progress has been made in this regard in school districts across the United States. One approach to change that is currently being used with some success in general…

In this article, Mark R. Warren argues that if urban school reform in the United States is to be successful, it must be linked to the revitalization of the communities around our schools. Warren identifies a growing field of collaboration between public schools and community-based organizations, developing a typology that identifies three…

This qualitative, historical study, based on interviews with participants and archive data, reconstructs the extended process through which three successive heads contributed to the transformation of the Felix Holt School. Over a 10-year period the roll rose from 560 to 1109, while the percentage of pupils achieving 5 GCSE higher grades increased…

This case study describes how an urban school system evolved to support an externally developed and externally introduced whole-school reform (WSR) effort. Based on interview data with school district staff and external partners, it analyzes a central office reorganization that placed all schools implementing a combination of Direct Instruction…

This study presents a rare opportunity to systematically examine the relationship between teachers' implementation of the America's Choice comprehensive school reform model and gains in student learning in an urban, at-risk school district. The results provide empirical evidence of relationships between student learning gains and variation in…

I examine the role that administrators play in facilitating the development, adoption, use, and evaluation of scientifically based interventions within the school culture to support the educational outcomes of students with learning disabilities (LD). Two ways of transforming the administrative role to support science in the schoolhouse are…

As the variety of state education agency (SEA) responses to the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 demonstrates, different SEAs interpret the same federal educational policy differently. Nonetheless, little research has depicted how federal policies are changed by SEA-based policy intermediaries. Using an "ethnography of educational policy"…

Vocational education, once the non-college prep track, has evolved with the times and the changing work force. Now called career and technology education, it is playing a major role in driving high school reform toward smaller learning communities and more focused futures for students. In this article, the author looks at one district's approach.…

Discusses the Systemic Change Model for Leadership, Inclusion, and Mentoring (SLIM), designed to help directors of child care organizations lead successful systemic changes. The model includes recommendations for building caring, consistent relationships with the total system, staff empowerment, a mentoring program to help the director focus…

The past decade has seen explosive growth in diverse learning options for young people, including new schools, vouchers, charter laws, and distance learning and dual-enrollment options that are blurring the lines between secondary and postsecondary institutions. The ways in which students move across and between the institutions of work and…

This article addresses the application of the Accelerated Schools Project (ASP) model in Hong Kong, as well as specific aspects of implementation in two schools. One lesson from the localized project, the Accelerated Schools for Quality Education (ASPQE), is that change is slow. This suggests that time should be given for both cultural change and…