This book considers how education might be organized around domains of caring. It envisions a school system built on the idea that different people have different strengths, and that these strengths should be cultivated in an environment of caring, not of competition. It is argued that liberal traditional education does not provide the best…

An international effort is under way to measure and assess the nature of imposed political reforms to education systems. Education is changing in relation to new structures and practices brought about during the process of reform at the school level. This paper investigates policy analysis of national reform in Australia, and in various states of…

Many educational reform initiatives are being tried in an effort to restructure the American school system. This guide compares major educational reform efforts by goal, vision, teaching and learning, and system components. The first section of the guide covers major systemic educational reform initiatives, including Accelerated Schools Project,…

What happens when the rhetoric of school reform meets the realities of school change? In this book, a teacher offers a down-to-earth, very personal, often funny account of what life is like in a middle-class, suburban high school where teachers, students, and administrators struggle against school bureaucracy, inertia, and the difficulty of…

Presenting diverse perspectives on current major education issues at the national level, this book addresses issues that have played out and will play out in the legislative process in the U.S. Congress. After the "Preface" (Jack Kosoy and Michael D. Usdan) and "Introduction" (John F. Jennings), the book is divided into four…

The relationship between two educational improvement initiatives--school restructuring and systemic curriculum reform--is examined in this bulletin. School restructuring tends to focus on process in schools and curriculum reform concentrates more directly on content and curriculum across a range of schools. The main features, their promises and…

The imperative for educational reform is more pressing now than ever, but change is slow and unsure. This paper offers a series of 11 proposals designed to demonstrate that educators can more fully participate in the structuring and forming (more than "reforming") of education. In summary, the proposals, each of which is fully described…

Different groups have different ideas about how schools should be restructured. Although decision-making and control are increasingly shared with other groups, the principal remains most accountable. Innovative leadership styles, such as the inhouse critic and the master generalist, address issues of curriculum totality, function, and goals.…

The Governor's Institutes of Vermont are summer programs for Vermont high school students with strong personal motivation and interest in Art, International Affairs, and Science and Technology. In summer of 1990, a new program, based on the concept that teachers teach better when they are learners as well as leaders and called the "Lead…

To identify the lessons learned from contracting with private managers in Philadelphia from 2002 to 2005, the author conducted an extensive document review and interviewed state, district and EMO personnel involved with the restructuring process and the specific management structure implemented to administer the Partnership School Model in…

It is intriguing and frustrating that while research evidence on characteristics of effective staff development programs has existed for some time, these features are not commonly in practice. Most of the staff development conducted with K-12 teachers corresponds with the short-term transmission model, with no concern for what is already going on…

This report extrapolates basic implications from work being done by pioneer initiatives to reform education support initiatives. Pioneer initiatives around the United States are demonstrating the need to rethink how schools and communities can meet the challenge of addressing persistent barriers to student learning. This report stresses the need…

Materials in this collection were submitted by school districts and programs participating in a "summit" of leaders involved in efforts to reform and restructure education support programs. Program descriptions and supplemental materials are provided for the: (1) Memphis, Tennessee City Schools, where the reform was a comprehensive…

The Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program (CSRD) is designed to assist low-performing schools, especially Title I schools. Grants are awarded through statewide competitions. This report offers the findings of Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning's analysis of the application process and characteristics of first-round…

A study was conducted to describe the population of alternative models for comprehensive school reform in the region served by Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL). The study addressed the questions of whether schools that did not propose to adopt widely known or implemented reform models were able to design a reform process…