What role does a person's support for local educational control play in determining her attitude towards equity-minded school finance reform? This article reports estimations of binary and ordered probit models of two state public opinion polls and discusses newspaper coverage from the same two states to determine if and how local control has such…

This study was designed to examine the effects of a whole school reform, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), specifically designed to raise academic achievement of at-risk urban middle school students by establishing an extended school day and year, a rigorous curriculum, after-school access to teachers, and increased family-school connections.…

This article situates Reggio Emilia's municipally funded early childhood program within the city's cultural traditions of resistance and collaboration and considers what it is about this highly localized program that is appealing and useful to contemporary school reform initiatives. Five features of Reggio Emilia's approach to early education are…

This report, the Center on Education Policy's (CEP's) third annual review of Maryland's efforts to restructure schools under the No Child Left Behind Act, finds that (1) although between school years 2006-07 and 2007-08 the number of schools in the restructuring implementation phase declined slightly, there was a drastic increase in the number of…

The National High School Center released methods for improving low-performing high schools based on some of the most rigorous research currently available in the school reform arena. This research brief identifies lessons learned as well as key practices used to strengthen high schools and is based on evaluations of four widely used high school…

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the average 17-year-old today is no more proficient at reading or mathematics than his counterpart in 1970. Some progress has been made by 9- and 13-year-olds, but the gains evaporate by the time these students reach the end of their K-12 experience. The average 17-year-old…

We evaluated the role that social capital among teachers plays in affecting teacher pedagogy in the context of comprehensive school reform (CSR). CSR implementation was designed to change school- and classroom-level processes, including organization and governance, curriculum and instruction, professional development (PD), and parental…

Inside High School Reform: Making Changes that Matter (WestEd) shares the critical lessons and compelling successes of 28 California Academic Partnership Program school reform efforts. In this interview, lead author Jordan Horowitz, WestEd's senior project director in evaluation research, recently shared some of the book's findings, and answered…

Economic growth in New Brunswick is increasingly dependent on the improvement of our educational system. Current initiatives to reform education and improve student performance are based on transforming the province's schools into professional learning communities (PLCs). A key factor that will determine this reform's success is the capacity of…

In this article, Jacqueline Ancess and David Allen use New York City as a case study to examine the promises and the perils of the small high school reform movement that is sweeping the nation. They analyze the varying extent to which New York City's small high schools have implemented curricular themes in order to promote academic quality and…

We provide here a brief historical analysis of a movement in progress from a belief-based "mystery" model to an evidence-based "mastery" model of giftedness and talent development. We have observed that educators concerned about exceptionally capable learners are moving from a categorical notion of "the typical gifted child" with somewhat…

In a study of how decisions were made in 24 restructuring schools (Kirby and Bogotch 1993), teachers claimed to have considerable decision authority. Teachers in most of the schools, however, reported that decision making was based on existing knowledge of the internal group. The Kirby and Bogotch (1993) model, developed from that study, links two…

Although private industry has been decentralizing for the past decade, community colleges have been slow to follow. For those colleges that have decentralized, traditional structured planning methodologies do not apply. The focus of strategic planning efforts at decentralized institutions is on the development of strategic themes to which…

School reform has taken many shapes over the years. Among the most pervasive of school-reform theories is school-based management (SBM), which is examined in detail in this book. The introductory chapter locates the current round of SBM in the longer cycle of educational reform, describes the extent of SBM activity over the past decade in the…

This publication is a followup report to Public Agenda's 1994 study on public-school education, entitled "First Things First." The publication reports findings of a 1995 study that investigated the public's perspective on school restructuring. Data were derived from a national telephone survey of 1,200 Americans, including 439 parents of children…