Summarizes the status of teacher pension plans in Canada's 10 provinces and considers their current role in renewing and downsizing educational systems in some provinces. Discusses pensions' use as economic instruments for provincial and national development and questions assumptions underlying the rhetoric celebrating their contribution to the…

This article discusses high schools and reform. During the past two decades, school reformers have sighed when speaking of change in secondary schools, saying they were the hardest--and would be the last--nutshell they would seek to crack in making significant improvements in the education of young people. Efforts in secondary schools would need…

This article reports that Massachusetts has made great strides in education over the past decade. The author attributes the success in large part to the very factors that have drawn the most criticism: the high standards and high stakes attached to the state assessments. Sections include: (1) The Massachusetts Case; (2) Implementation; and (3) The…

Although reports calling for middle level schooling reform first appeared in the mid-1970s, change has been slow to come. In Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (1989), the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development outlined eight essential elements of middle level education. Drawing from the Carnegie Council's…

American public schools are in clear need of real school reform centered on leadership style and organizational structure. To help bring about such reform, lessons taught by the new sciences and through the lens of critical theory need to be considered. At the beginning of the Industrial Age, businesses organized their burgeoning systems using…

Both in structure and focus, FLCs create a necessary construct for a cultural transformation of teaching and learning that invites all to achieve their intellectual and social potential. The following are appended: (1) Self-Assessment Inventory on Inclusiveness; and (2) Student Assessment of Classroom Climate.

This article argues that issues surrounding adolescent literacies problematize the relationship between the acquisition of core skills, the need to connect with a more expansive repertoire of literate practices, and a middle school reform initiative that encourages greater connectedness to the world of the adolescent. The terms "public literacy"…

The most recent school reform agenda directed the development of national standards across the academic content areas to improve educational practice and pedagogy. U.S. Department of Education's (1994) Goals 2000: The Educate America Act and its subsequent nationwide implementation largely ignored the involvement of school counseling in school…

In this article, I outline how, with the appropriate mix of external requirements and internal motivation, structure and capacity, a school can promote and maintain a culture of evaluative practices, specifically data use, for continuous improvement. I draw upon qualitative data conducted in a study of an Edison Project school. The findings from…

This article presents initial findings of a case study focusing on data use in five low-performing urban high schools undergoing comprehensive schoolwide reform. The case study investigates: (a) the ways in which disaggregated data can be used to examine progress and guide improvement in the process of restructuring urban, low-performing high…

The purpose of this naturalistic experiment was to discover the operative elements of an evidence-based reform effort that accounted for growth in student achievement. The reform was implemented in 13 schools around the United States over the course of two years. The authors studied the impact of both school-level programmatic elements and…

Emphasizing the salience of social and historical contexts in understanding contemporary urban school leadership, this article presents reflections from a subset of African American women principals who came of age during the Civil Rights era and assumed leadership subsequent to the enactment of the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. The main…

This book is a survival guide as well as a valuable tool for making our schools more effective and appropriate places for students to learn and achieve. Exploring the often complex, multifaceted, and co-occurring problems in the education system, the book addresses specific problems, discusses the real reasons they developed and persist, describes…

As Congress considers reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, it should recognize the need for fundamental reform of federal K-12 education policy, which since 1965 has followed a path of greater federal control of education, the proliferation of bureaucracy, higher administrative costs, and new federal programs. Under the…

This study of teacher staffing issues in the School District of Philadelphia, the third in a series, outlines the degree to which the district has succeeded in upgrading teachers' professional credentials, recruiting and retaining them, and equitably distributing experienced and credentialed teachers across all types of schools. Since the passage…