This ambitious book aims to reorient discussions about school reform by moving away from "whole school" solutions to customized services and products. While the best-known entrepreneurial efforts have sought to fix problems at a schoolwide level, this volume looks at "how providers might use new tools to deliver or customize services that do not…

This dissertation focuses on the intersection of law and pedagogy in special education classrooms as constructed in the discourse of special education teachers. The fitful and sometimes merely symbolic implementation of the prescriptions of school reform laws in individual classroom settings is well known. This dissertation seeks to unpack this…

Thousands of educators, parent activists, and others are expected to convene in the heat and humidity of Washington next month for a march protesting the current thrust of education policy in the United States, especially the strong emphasis on test-based accountability. Organizers of the Washington say U.S. policymakers are moving in the wrong…

In this article, we report on our initial work with the International School Leadership Development Network. In doing so, we present two cases of principals leading high-need schools, and conclude with some key observations in relation to what is distinctive about leading these schools. The first case features a principal leading a suburban school…

Participating in the Save Our School march was an inspiring event, the reverberating impact from which will be long-lasting. The march, which was endorsed by the Executive Board of Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI), was an effort to call awareness to the struggles that public education faces in the United States. The guiding…

The swift nature of school reform enacted by the new Conservative-led coalition government has sparked debate over the future of state education in Britain. While the government rhetoric suggests a decisive break with past policies, there is evidence to suggest that these reforms constitute the next stage of a long revolution in education reform,…

Background: Students' perspective on education is of crucial importance for its effectivity, but students' opinions are seldom acknowledged by teachers and designers. Student participation in the educational design process could be a suitable tool to better take students' preferences into account. However, for effective participatory design, it is…

Behind the thin veil of the Conservative regime's rationale of deficit reduction hides the final demolition of public comprehensive education and Raymond Williams's more expansive long revolution unfolding over a century of creating a democratic state that affords opportunity, voice and justice for all. Restoring the politics of a pre-war or…

State lawmakers and community activists are making a new push for "parent trigger" laws, measures that let parents vote to convert academically struggling schools to charters or to radically restructure them in other ways. But proponents and critics of the often-controversial, citizen-led efforts are divided on just how profound an…

In this article, the author focuses on the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and educational reform. The Klan's meteoric rise to national prominence in the 1920s has attracted a great deal of attention from historians, yet the group and its popularity during this time frame remain poorly understood. This is due in part to the fact that Klan symbols such…

This study explores what academics in one major university in Great Britain (The Great Western University) perceive interdisciplinary research (IDR) to be, and in doing so, differentiates it from associated concepts, such as multidisciplinary research and transdisciplinary research, found in the research literature. This study is important because…

Many countries design and implement school change with a focus on the fundamental reconfiguration in the structures of schooling. In this article, we examined the relationship between principal leadership and teacher resistance to school reforms driven by external interveners. For an empirical analysis, we took advantage of extensive data derived…

Many schools are starting Small Learning Communities yet much is unknown about their outcomes. Students are literally disappearing in comprehensive high schools and violence has escalated. Those who implement Small Learning Communities are looking to combat these problems. While rarely feasible to split large schools into smaller schools, it is…

The author often says that Rethinking Schools began on his kitchen table with a can of rubber cement and an Apple IIe computer. But that's not exactly true. In some ways the publication started a year and half earlier in a study group of teachers and community activists who were struggling to figure out how to apply a generally progressive,…

The paper explores pedagogies of surveillance and counter pedagogies of radical democracy and co-operative practice and their implications for continuing professional development (CPD). Teachers have had to respond to an increasing naturalisation of surveillance in schools. However, this naturalisation can be countered by drawing upon the emergent…