Describes the evolution of the Manitoba School Improvement Program's approach to evaluation as a way to build school improvement capacity. Explores what has been learned about how to move schools into an empowerment model of evaluation and considers the benefits of empowerment evaluation to educational reform. (SLD)

This article describes a comparative framework for identifying, analyzing, and practicing acts of leadership. The triadic framework identifies transactional, transformational, and critical domains of leadership, and argues that teachers, heretofore ignored or neglected in discussions of school management, are pivotal leaders in school reform…

With the arrival of the 21st century, a serious reappraisal of the school reforms from the previous century emerged. For the most part, these reappraisals reflected skepticism about many of the reforms that were characteristic of the "progressive era," and, here and there, pessimism about the extent to which fundamental change can be…

When California set out nearly 10 years ago to reduce class sizes in the early grades, educators nationwide looked West with awe and envy at the ambitious move to ease the task of teaching millions of the state's youngest students. In this article, the author examines the effects of California's class-size reduction program. State Superintendent…

The current emphasis on school reform makes many demands on principals. The case study in this article describes the experiences of one urban junior high school principal who was part of a five-year federal grant that targets schools with at-risk youth. Themes that emerged from this qualitative study include school culture, educator and student…

The notion of "student voice," or a student role in the decision making and change efforts of schools, has emerged in the new millennium as a potential strategy for improving the success of school reform efforts. Yet few studies have examined this construct either theoretically or empirically. Grounded in a sociocultural perspective, this article…

This article integrates the technical model of policy implementation with a co-constructed perspective of implementation to understand the impact of the New Jersey Department of Education's (NJDOE) actions and policies on implementation of a set of court-ordered mandates in 30 of the state's poorest school districts (referred to as the Abbott or…

For more than a decade, the economic, social, political and cultural effects of globalisation have been central topics of debate. Those who see globalisation as a combination of economic transactions and worldwide telecommunications tend to believe that its impact is profound, inasmuch as it is fundamentally altering the way in which we live and…

Teacher leadership represents a powerful approach to assert the true professionalism that educators have long been seeking. Opportunities abound for teachers to contribute to school reform by demonstrating their leadership skills. This article considers strategies to rebuild the portrait of teachers and thereby encourage strong professional…

In this article, the author talks about the significance of imagination as the first step on the road to school reform. In too many cases, teachers and administrators in public schools have downplayed imagination and given up its possibilities for furthering their work in new ways. Most school systems and schools do not really want educators to…

School-based staff developers are becoming more common, but their job description is often poorly focused and their duties varied. The fate of this emerging model of professional development will depend on whether districts and school leaders devote time and resources to develop this strategy into a meaningful method of school reform.

In 2000, Cook, Murphy, and Hunt published a multilevel study of Chicago inner-city schools in order to evaluate James Comer's School Development Program (SDP). One main finding was that SDP reduced the rate of change and final posttest mean when delinquency was assessed annually between Grades 5 and 8 using a self-report measure of acting out. The…

Urban high school reform is one of the most significant challenges facing education today. In response to this challenge, reformers have put significant energy toward restructuring the large high school primarily through creating smaller school settings. Although the research literature often draws connections between school size and student…

The idea of collective decision making in schools has been a popular democratic educational reform model. One of its claims is that participation in school decision making empowers teachers and improves teaching. This research investigates this claim by exploring seven teachers' experiences with a unique democratic school reform in Porto Alegre,…

Few people have been more involved in shaping postwar U.S. education reforms--or dissented from some of them more effectively--than Chester Finn. Assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, and an aide to politicians as different as Richard Nixon and Daniel Moynihan, Finn has also been a high school teacher, an education professor, a…