At the national level, debate about school reform typically has been characterized by clashing paradigms offering unicausal explanations and universal prescriptions. At the street level, where parents and practitioners wrestle on a day-to-day basis with questions of what to do, the terms of discussion more typically are concrete, rooted in local…

Over the past twenty years, youth organizing has grown across the country. Through organizing, young people identify issues of concern and mobilize their peers to build action campaigns to achieve their objectives. Youth organizing has been appreciated for its contributions to youth and community development. The authors use two case studies to…

Background/Context: In 2000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began an ambitious initiative intended to catalyze the fundamental transformation of American high schools. This article summarizes the results of a 5-year national evaluation of the first stage of the foundation's initiative. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This…

Teacher education and continuing professional development have become key areas of controversy in England since the period of school-sector restructuring following the 1988 Education Reform Act. More recently, teacher training and professional development have often been used to promote and reinforce a narrow focus on the government's…

The objective of this systematic review is to summarize the available evidence on the effects of prevention and intervention programs aimed at primary and secondary students for increasing school completion or reducing school dropout. Program effects on the closely related outcomes of school attendance (absences, truancy) will also be examined.…

America is failing its young Black boys. In metropolitan ghettos, rural villages and midsized townships across the country, schools have become holding tanks for populations of Black boys who have a statistically higher probability of walking the corridors of prison than the halls of college. Across America, the problem of Black male achievement…

Discusses various popular definitions of educational restructuring and the different roles that technology plays in each theory. Annotated citations to pertinent literature are given for each definition, including restructuring as reform; as revolution; and as reinvention. (Author/LRW)

This article discusses the meaning of the idea that schools should be communities. It argues that the view that schools should be communities should be viewed as a distinct vision of school reform because it has a distinct vision of the problems that require solution (alienation and disengagement) and how they are to be solved. It contrasts this…

For nearly 20 years the system has waded around in the swamp of school reform, fixing schools that are not broken and leveraging change that is not necessary. It is quite simple. Current educational reforms are based on a misguided, mechanistic view of the world. This view rests on the Descartian (Cartesian) belief that the universe is like a…

This article reports key findings from a process-focused external evaluation that compared a subset of "Getting Results" project schools and comparison schools in order to understand the dynamics of school-wide reform efforts at these primary schools. Findings shed light on the "black box" of school reform and illuminate the…

Despite a growing awareness of the implications of the changing nature of literacy due to the impact of technological innovations, literacy pedagogies in educational institutions across the world continue to be predicated on a performative model, in which emphasis is placed on transmitting narrow concepts of literacy that privilege the alphabetic…

Early College High Schools (ECHS) are at the forefront of high school reform embodying the principles of rigor, relationship, and relevance. This study examines students' learning experiences in the context of relationships and rigor at an ECHS. Specifically, I investigate factors that influence students to attend an ECHS, what they attribute to…

Background/Context: Student motivation typically has been studied as it relates to extrinsic (e.g., reinforcement) and intrinsic (e.g., choice) sources of influence. Our observation of Grades 3-5 classrooms engaged in Comprehensive School Reform (CSR), however, unexpectedly indicated that opportunities for both rewards and choice were scarce. This…

There is a disconnect between what principals are being asked to manage and accomplish and the level of support they receive to meet expectations. At a time when rhetoric on the principalship is focused on collaboration, most principals find themselves working in an isolated position within hierarchical organizations. And while principals are…

This paper aims to discuss the challenges in the process of building a learning community in Vietnamese primary schools. Five lessons emerge from the cases. First, changing teachers' beliefs is time-consuming. Second, because of the reluctance of teachers to change, large-scale delivery of the educational project should be critically revisited…