Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, schools, districts, states, and the federal government devoted enormous resources to the implementation of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models. With more than 1.6 billion federal dollars distributed through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) project and its successor, the CSR project,…

Arlene C. Ackerman, who took the helm of Philadelphia's public schools a little more than a year ago, is pushing for changes that would upend how teachers are paid and assigned to schools. The veteran urban superintendent is battling tradition in the 167,000-student system, but insists that increasing the effectiveness of the city's nearly 10,700…

Opponents of non-state schooling--especially faith-based schools--contend that society is fragile, constantly in danger of splintering along ethnic, social class, and religious lines, and that only the common public school operated by government can create national unity and mutual tolerance. Confessional schools are a constant threat to the…

That advisories in secondary schools are fairly pervasive around the country may be one of the great unintended consequences of the Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) reform effort. While no CES Common Principle explicitly states that advisories should exist in schools, as Coalition Schools evolved, advisories became one of the logical ways for…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore and describe the limits of recent law-based school reform in South Africa from an education management perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The research design consists of a qualitative, investigative, descriptive and contextual design which Merriam would classify as a basic or generic design type.…

Successful school reform requires that administrators, teachers, and students internalize the value of improved teaching and learning and of the policies, structures, procedures, and behaviors implicit in the reform. This is most likely to happen when school personnel and students experience satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for…

Many scholars have found fault with the way business schools conduct their business (Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Mintzberg, 2004; Bennis & O'Toole, 2005; Andrews & Tyson, 2006). This article argues that B-schools should overhaul their curriculum and encourage faculty to undertake research which is useful for practitioners. Suggestions are made for…

In many middle and high schools, literacy is seen as secondary to school reform; it is often perceived as being a problem for only a few students-that improving the literacy abilities of students is remedial in nature and should not be part of the "normal" classroom. It is felt that improving literacy levels should be the responsibility of English…

U.S. educators and policymakers are concerned about the poor performance of the public schools, particularly schools that serve students from low-income families. Although education is primarily a state function, the federal government also has a longstanding interest in improving education for disadvantaged students, and it targets funding to…

For most of the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has centered on teacher quality. In this debate, teachers and their unions have often been seen as the problem, not part of the solution. Further, current discourse often assumes that conflicting interests between teacher unions and administration is inevitable.…

Although a relatively new idea in the U.S., weighted student funding (WSF) for individual schools has a long history in the Netherlands. This country of about 16.5 million people has been using a version of WSF for all its primary schools (serving children from age 4 to 12) for 25 years. In this article we describe and evaluate the Dutch system…

This paper documents the initial process by which a San Diego middle school, located in a low-income and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and repeatedly failing to meet No Child Left Behind provisions, restructured into an academically rigorous, detracked charter school. The discussion of the political experience and working relationships…

This report synthesizes findings from CEP's (Center on Education Policy's) research on how the No Child Left Behind Act's school restructuring requirements are being implemented in Michigan, California, Maryland, Ohio, and Georgia. Document reviews and interviews with state officials were conducted in the five states, and case study research was…

When "A Nation at Risk" appeared in 1983, everyone saw school reform through a lens of preconceived ideas about teaching and learning, and every part of the land of education reacted differently to the report. Some saw the problem as "bad teachers," which immediately raised the question of "bad schools of education" where they were trained.…

While the research continues to mount on the benefits of school downsizing and decentralizing efforts in urban areas, there exists a paradox for small school Administrators who continue to struggle against forces of consolidation. Small schools in rural and suburban districts have fought for their existence against the pressures of consolidation…