Dropout prevention programs are school- and community-based initiatives that aim to keep students in school and encourage them to complete their high school education. To be included in the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) review, programs have to operate within the United States and include dropout prevention as one of their primary objectives.…

This guide provides users with a step by step approach to restructuring, from organizing a district team and assessing the district's capacity to govern restructuring decisions to conducting a school-by-school analysis and implementing a restructuring plan. The text of the guide is supplemented with templates, checklists, and other practical…

Over the past 25 years a major shift in political ideology has refocused educational politics from equality issues to issues relating to excellence, accountability, and choice. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Act (ESEA) first passed in 1965. NCLB legislation is a continuation of the educational…

This is the second and final report for MDRC's evaluation of the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), a grant-making and support organization in San Francisco, California. BASRC is dedicated to improving student achievement in public schools and narrowing achievement gaps among different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. BASRC…

Schools must have the capacity to change. School administrators must be able to find a balance in distributing administrative authority in schools. In an effort to evoke meaningful change within the organization of secondary school structures, administrators must be advocates of change and support their staff members by decentralizing key roles by…

This article applies Foucault's notion of governmentality to educational restructuring in post-apartheid South Africa. It argues that the nature of government in a modern state entails engaging with particular practices and domains of knowledge, which themselves constrain the changes that are conceivable and credible. Using Foucault's concepts of…

In spite of the emphasis in public policy and the professional literature on developing inclusive programs for students with disabilities over the past 30 years, surprisingly little progress has been made in this regard in school districts across the United States. One approach to change that is currently being used with some success in general…

This qualitative, historical study, based on interviews with participants and archive data, reconstructs the extended process through which three successive heads contributed to the transformation of the Felix Holt School. Over a 10-year period the roll rose from 560 to 1109, while the percentage of pupils achieving 5 GCSE higher grades increased…

In this article, the author discusses the issue of high school reform in American high schools. According to him, there are a number of reasons, but chief among them is that a consensus haven't been reached on what high schools are supposed to do. He states that America can claim it has some of the best high schools in the world, and it does. But…

With some notable exceptions, the school critics in the first and second "waves" of restructuring have largely neglected problems of resistance in implementation of reform. The primary task of managing change is not technical, but motivational. Building commitment to innovation among those who must implement it requires a focus on readiness.…

The Mid-continent Regional Educational Laboratory (McREL), with funding from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, undertook a project to address needs for school reform support that were identified as common among states in its region. In order to assist in a strategy for leveraging limited resources, McREL proposed to identify…

Since 1988, considerable state and school/district energies have been devoted to implementing Re:Learning in Pennsylvania. This paper describes the experiences of Cycle I project directors who implemented Re:Learning in late 1988 or early 1989. Re:Learning is a national effort to redesign the total school system, based on Theodore Sizer's (1984)…

Nested in a complex environment of expectations, regulations, professional standards, and historical traditions, schools are the object of many influences. The main question of this paper is: To what extent and under what conditions do external agents help schools develop intellectual quality and strong professional communities? The paper examines…

In 1994 the Ohio State Legislature established Venture Capital to support school restructuring. The Venture Capital school initiative is a concept borrowed from the business community in which the corporate entity provides risk capital to parts of the organization to stimulate creative ideas and to provide opportunities for local entities to try…

Considerable research supports the notion that individuals' level of cognitive complexity influences their behavior. This paper presents findings of a study that explored the relationship between principals' supervisory beliefs and the implementation of integrated-curriculum approaches. The first phase of the study surveyed a total of 400…