How can principals and teachers use available data to plan school improvements? How can principals and teachers gather and analyze data that are useful for school reform? Karen Levesque and her colleagues sum up the problem of data use in schools this way. Most school districts and schools in this country are routinely involved in data collection.…

Many school systems across the United States have begun redesign efforts by investing in smaller high school settings (Cawelti, 1999). Transforming schools into structured academic or career-themed academies has been associated with increased student achievement and more personalized learning environments. Ongoing collaboration of district level…

Americans live in a great nation, one in which every child is entitled to an education that will help that child reach success. But the debate has raged for years about whether the nation's education system is fulfilling the promise of not just an education, but an education of the highest caliber. Whenever the issue of school reform is addressed,…

Today's education technology holds immense promise, but what matters more than the tools themselves are how they are used in schools and in classrooms. In "Breakthrough Leadership in the Digital Age," Frederick M. Hess and Bror Saxberg argue that educators have tended to think of adopting technology as a way to "reform" or…

While heads were spinning, policy watchers seemed genuinely perplexed by New York City's Mayor de Blasio's education opinions. De Blasio opposed many of Bloomberg's reform efforts despite the achievement gains realized by the nation's largest school district during the last 12 years. Yet on close reading, de Blasio's nine-page education plan…

Research to date about the English government's policy to make schools independent of local authorities (LAs) has looked at the "macro" level of national policy and at the "micro" level of the institution. The study of which this article is a part, explores changes at the "meso" level--the locality. The article…

This paper intends to describe the recent experience of a small, rural, two-year technical college. After four decades of success, the college had found itself in a difficult situation with a substantial loss in enrollment and diminished state and local support, coupled with low campus employee morale. In response, the college team closed ranks…

Recently, educators and policymakers have taken steps to improve high school graduation rates. Their efforts have already led to a record 83.2 percent graduation rate in 2016 and a 40 percent reduction over the past decade in the number of high schools graduating less than 6 in 10 students. Yet significant challenges for high schools remain.…

High stakes testing has been long established in the English school system. In this article, we seek to demonstrate how testing has become pivotal to securing the neo-liberal restructuring of schools, that commenced during the Thatcher era, and is reaching a critical point at the current time. Central to this project has been the need to assert…

School change has been at center of school reform, and many schools have moved to meet the needs of students in various areas. In many instances, there has been only one addition to the school system to serve as the element of school change. Today's school communities need a deeper understanding not only of what research says about school change,…

Jim Garrison's article (Garrison 2012) critiques current reforms in the United States for fostering a harmful "standardization" in schooling, which threatens to further undermine the country's democratic heritage and to prepare many students for servitude in an oppressive social order. John Dewey is cited throughout, as befits Professor…

In Someone Has to Fail, Labaree (2010) offers an admirably concise overview of the history and promise of education reform in the United States, combining insights from the history of education, policy studies, and a refreshingly accurate and nuanced account of what it is like to actually manage a classroom environment. While in this essay we…

This article presents a policy sociology reflection on Bernard Barker's book, "The Pendulum Swings: Transforming School Reform". The book represents Barker's attempt to intervene in education policy during the lead-up to the 2010 UK general election and is framed by what he imagined might be possible under a new Conservative government.…

For nearly a decade, New York City education groups organizing to improve education under Bloomberg could regularly be found protesting on the steps of City Hall. Before the 2013 mayoral race, a typical education protest would--at its best--earn media coverage from a couple of outlets. The fact that parents, students, and teachers rally for more…

The racial achievement gap has persisted in the decades since "Brown v. Board," despite large-scale investment in school reform. Accordingly, some administrators and politicians are reconsidering integration policies as a means of addressing the gap. This study examines one Chicago community's discussion of such integration policy.…