In this article, the author talks about the significance of imagination as the first step on the road to school reform. In too many cases, teachers and administrators in public schools have downplayed imagination and given up its possibilities for furthering their work in new ways. Most school systems and schools do not really want educators to…

School-based staff developers are becoming more common, but their job description is often poorly focused and their duties varied. The fate of this emerging model of professional development will depend on whether districts and school leaders devote time and resources to develop this strategy into a meaningful method of school reform.

This article traces the conception of "the problem with the public school" as represented in 3 reform documents: "A Nation at Risk" (1983), the "National Education Summit Policy Statement" (1996), and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB). I examine the problem definitions and solutions manifested in each reform…

This brief focuses on a vital aspect of efficacy known as "collective teacher efficacy" (CTE). CTE refers to the perceptions of teachers that the efforts of the faculty as a whole will have a positive effect on students. Principals and district leaders should turn their attention to improving CTE because it has an impressive list of positive…

The role of the teacher in the modern school system is increasingly important and complex. A teacher needs a high level of professional knowledge and autonomous decision-making when faced with professional challenges. The curricular reform in Slovenia has encompassed several areas of teachers' professional activities. This paper establishes that…

After almost three decades of school reform, student achievement nationally is about where it was when it started, and student behavior has declined dramatically. Numbers of dropouts, especially in cities and among the poor and minorities, have gotten much higher. Yet many billions of dollars have been spent; countless professionals have carried…

After a period of top-down control under the mayor, the New York City system is freeing schools to run their own affairs--and holding them accountable for results. This fall, for the first time, each of the district's 1,456 public schools gained unprecedented control over budgetary and instructional decisions that previously resided with the…

Many policymakers feel pressure to claim that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is boosting student performance, as Congress reconsiders the federal government's role in school reform. But how should politicians and activists gauge NCLB's effects? The authors offer evidence on three barometers of student performance, drawing from the National Assessment…

This article is an attempt to critique some of the limitations of dominant school reform discourses in education, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, and Dennis Carlson, in addition to writers in the emerging field of what might be called "eco-progressivism." The intersections between ecology and education can…

The ills of urban schools are well documented. The challenges of recruiting and retaining quality teachers, student mobility, poor conditions of school facilitates, and lack of parent involvement are only a few of the issues related to urban schools. Large comprehensive high schools are a staple of many urban school districts. This model of…

Efforts to infuse market forces into public education are based on the supposition that these forces can improve student outcomes. This assumption does not consider the politics of implementation. This article examines state-initiated school privatization and reveals factors that influence translation of theory to practice. The cases depict what…

In 2000, Cook, Murphy, and Hunt published a multilevel study of Chicago inner-city schools in order to evaluate James Comer's School Development Program (SDP). One main finding was that SDP reduced the rate of change and final posttest mean when delinquency was assessed annually between Grades 5 and 8 using a self-report measure of acting out. The…

Urban high school reform is one of the most significant challenges facing education today. In response to this challenge, reformers have put significant energy toward restructuring the large high school primarily through creating smaller school settings. Although the research literature often draws connections between school size and student…

The idea of collective decision making in schools has been a popular democratic educational reform model. One of its claims is that participation in school decision making empowers teachers and improves teaching. This research investigates this claim by exploring seven teachers' experiences with a unique democratic school reform in Porto Alegre,…

Few people have been more involved in shaping postwar U.S. education reforms--or dissented from some of them more effectively--than Chester Finn. Assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, Finn has also been a high school teacher, an education professor, a…