Barry M. Franklin's new work uses the concept of community as a lens for interpreting urban school reform since 1960. Focusing on the curriculum and employing case studies, he applies the concept to reform initiatives in a number of city school systems. Included are compensatory education, community control, mayoral takeovers, educational…

A framework for urban public high school reform is presented for managing site-based change through re-envisioning, reculturation, restructuring, and remoralization. The four Rs for reform framework is elucidated through a qualitative study of a low-performing urban public high school that was transformed into a new more successful school. The…

This article explores local state bilingual-education policy vis-a-vis pervasive dominant-language ideologies about language-education policy and practice. State-level language-education policy, especially for English Language Learners (ELs), spans a wide range, from states that through policy legally require some form of bilingual education to…

The current report looks at the effects of the Green Dot Locke (GDL) transformation on students over the past three years. Although the GDL transformation began in fall 2007 (with two small off-site schools), the majority of Locke students were not included in the transition until fall 2008. Comparing GDL students to a matched sample of students…

Many school districts had to cope with shrinking budgets this past school year, but the effects of these cuts were cushioned to some extent by the availability of federal economic stimulus money. In 2009 and 2010, school districts received about $80 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). These funds were intended…

Professional collaboration in schools features prominently in contemporary approaches to educational change. Advocates highlight the importance of situated knowledge to continuous teacher learning, sustained school reform and improved student learning. Critics portray collaboration as an invisible and coercive means of official control. The…

Most K-12 school districts know that they are losing children who are going to other programs to get their needs met, and they know that they are going to have to offer some kind of online program to meet those needs if they are going to survive. K-12 districts have not exactly been sitting on the online-learning sidelines. In fact, by pioneering…

Over the past two decades, the perceived failed promise of the comprehensive high school to effectively educate America's youth has generated a national interest in high school reform. One such area of reform is a movement to restructure high schools as small learning communities centered around unique curriculum and state-of-the-art teaching.…

This report outlines how digital learning can connect middle and high school students with better teaching and learning experiences while also addressing three major challenges facing the nation's education system--access to good teaching, tight budgets, and boosting student achievement. But simply slapping a netbook on top of a textbook will not…

This study attempts to identify and describe Minnesota superintendents' perceptions of barriers to district-level reform as well as compare superintendents' perceptions of district reform related characteristics. This research also strives to identify factors preventing Minnesota's district-level leadership from implementing national reform…

We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform implemented in 100 low achieving schools serving disadvantaged students in a Canadian province. The results show that while Struggling Schools had a statistically significant positive effect on Grade 3 Reading achievement, d = 0.48…

Finland has, as of late, become an inspiration for American school reform. There is no denying that we have much to learn from the Finnish system and it rightly deserves its global accolades. However, over the course of the following pages, I would like to suggest that it is also lucrative to look north of the 49th parallel and consider the…

Former high school teacher, school leader, activist, consultant, and now professor of education James Nehring combines vivid case studies with practical suggestions to describe how the system works to thwart good schools and what educators can do to improve them. In this book he paints the big picture of school reform in the United States, deftly…

This study analyzes six different National Comprehensive Reform Models through multiple lenses. It seeks to discover how the models of ATLAS Communities, Accelerated Schools Plus, Co-nect Schools, Expeditionary Learning Schools Outward Bound, Modern Red SchoolHouse and Urban Learning Centers both restructure and reculture the schools in which they…

What to do about persistently low-performing schools is a pressing challenge for policymakers and educators across the nation. Schools that fail to make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) for five consecutive years under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) must be "restructured." The 3,500 schools in the United States currently in…