The conversion of large urban high schools into small, focused learning centers is gaining currency as an education reform strategy. This publication provides guidelines, along with guiding questions, for those considering such a conversion. The first section explores the structural, organizational, and political challenges involved in converting…

Multiyear teaching is part of an ongoing interest in ways of organizing schools to best support the social and academic aims of education. Here, teachers are assigned to follow the same class as their students move together from one grade level to the next. In the first of three sections, the potential benefits of multiyear teaching are introduced…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states and school districts to act aggressively to turn around failing schools. NCLB lists 31 different interventions of varying degrees of severity that are available to state and local policymakers when faced with schools whose students fail to make sufficient academic progress and sets forth…

For at least 20 years, America has been engaged in the process of school reform, the most recent of which is the P-16 education reform movement. However, the phenomenon of two- and four-year colleges working closely with schools is clearly not new. A divide has developed between the educational levels, resulting in a lack of collaboration among…

A diverse and growing body of research points to the need for an overhaul of America's public education systems. The Panasonic Foundation created its Partnership Program for systemic educational reform in 1987. Since then, the foundation has collaborated with 16 school districts and 3 state departments of education. This book informs others…

The Bureau for Africa of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been examining in detail the question of how best to support and sustain sectorwide education reform in Africa. The USAID and Education Commission of the States jointly sponsored a seminar in October 1996 to examine the issue of "scaling up" and…

Education reform efforts across the United States are dramatically raising expectations for student achievement. However, the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) found that teachers have not been adequately prepared for the changes in practice needed to meet new student learning goals. This publication briefly examines research…

Some of the difficult questions surrounding intensive scheduling, along with examples of successful applications of this approach, are described in this document. This book offers a blueprint from a practitioner's perspective and is intended for educators and lay people interested in improving secondary schools. Chapter 1 demonstrates how to…

In 1988, the Education Commission of the States and Coalition of Essential Schools joined forces to create Re:Learning, which aimed to change the education system and bring about improved learning for all students. This report describes the development and implementation of the program and focuses on program influences on student achievement and…

Casebooks are becoming an increasingly popular format within education for structuring conversations around challenging issues. Although most education cases provide simple snapshots of classroom interactions, the cases provided in this text focus on some of the challenges faced by educators and communities intent upon reforming entire schools and…

A descriptive study was conducted that examined urban school counseling professionals' perception of school restructuring activities such as school-based management, community-school partnerships, and school-based family counseling. Professional school counselors (N=102) working in urban schools were surveyed. Several implications can be drawn…

This paper presents a dialogue on the subject of reading instruction in the 20th century, comparing historical perceptions of American public schooling with those of contemporary schools. It suggests that prognosticating about schooling traditionally seems to fall into the two categories of wildly optimistic or cautiously pessimistic, and that the…

The Accelerated Schools Approach is a whole-school reform being implemented in more than 1,000 U.S. elementary and middle schools. The program is characterized by a school structure that sets high expectations for students and teachers, a governance structure with broad teacher participation, and a "powerful learning" approach to…

This report examines the balance that exists between school-based management mandates and the superintendent's ultimate responsibility for student performance in Texas. It claims that the literature on school-based management stipulates that states must transfer authority, responsibility, and accountability from the central office to the school…

This paper explores how characteristics of complex educational change may virtually dictate the leadership strategies adopted by those charged with bringing about change. The change in question here is the large-scale reorganization of local education authorities (LEAs) across England. The article focuses on how across-the-board initiatives to…