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One of the great challenges now facing education reformers in the United States is how to devise a consistent and intelligent framework for instruction that will work across the nation’s notoriously fragmented and politically conflicted school systems. Various programs have tried to do that, but only a few have succeeded. Improvement by Design looks at three different programs, seeking to understand why two of them—America’s Choice and Success for All—worked, and why the third—Accelerated Schools Project—did not. The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.
This book examines the complexity of effective, large-scale, and sustainable education reform through a historical analysis of the Success for All Foundation, an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools across the US to enact a common design for comprehensive school reform, all in the effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. The purpose of the book is to develop an analytic framework to assist education reformers in seeing and confronting complexity in their own improvement efforts.
The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education is a pathbreaking effort to build a field of research committed to producing the practical knowledge needed to advance educational access, quality, and equity. This is research distinguished by the use of inclusive, iterative approaches to analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation to understand and address educational opportunities, needs, and problems grounded deeply in school and community contexts. Designed for researchers, students, and educators, the handbook elaborates the intellectual foundations, explores the organizational and policy contexts, reviews approaches, and examines methods of improvement research. It features contributions from a plural community of researchers with expertise in the learning sciences, instructional improvement, organizational and policy studies, and research methodologies, many with extensive experience collaborating with teachers, leadership, families, and advocates in local problem solving and design.
With a visionary approach to school improvement, Equity-Based Leadership proposes a framework to support system leaders seeking to organize change and achieve more equitable education. In this ambitious yet pragmatic work, Joshua P. Starr makes the case that intentional and attentive district leadership can bring about continuous improvement in schools. When district reforms are conceived with social justice in mind, Starr explains, schools move toward fulfilling the longstanding promise of equitable education in America. Starr asserts that the essential goal of good system leadership lies in designing, implementing, and sustaining comprehensive strategies for school reform, in collaboration...
This book examines the idea of educational accountability in higher education, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make colleges better? What if educational accountability tools don’t actually measure what they’re supposed to? What if accountability data isn’t valid, or worse, what if it’s meaningless? What if administrators don’t know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can’t measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters most with teaching or student learning. What if students don’t learn much in college? What if higher education was never designed to produce student learning? What if college doesn’t help most students, either personally or economically? What if higher education isn’t meritocratic, actually exacerbates inequality, and makes the lives of disadvantaged students even worse? This book will answer these questions with a wide, interdisciplinary range of the latest scientific research.
The challenges we face in education, health care, and social welfare are multifaceted, reflecting the complex systems in which we live. Out of urgency and often the best of intentions, organizations implement new policies, technologies, and other innovations to tackle these issues, and hope for the best. However, addressing these challenges requires more than heroic individuals with silver-bullet solutions. We need teams with diverse expertise that know how to learn together and use their collective knowledge to redesign our social systems for the improved well-being of our communities. Journey to Improvement serves as a road map for teams that are ready to follow a different path to better outcomes. Drawing on their decades of on-the-ground experience, the authors walk teams through the phases of an improvement journey from launching the team to trying ideas in practice to spreading those that work. This book highlights the personal, relational, and technical aspects of taking an improvement science approach and illustrates these ideas through real-world examples from across the social sector and around the world.
In The Allure of Order, Mehta recounts a century of attempts at revitalizing public education, and puts forward a truly new agenda to reach this elusive goal. Over and over again, outsiders have been fascinated by the promise of scientific management and have attempted to apply principles of rational administration from above. What we want, Mehta argues, is the opposite approach which characterizes top-performing educational nations: attract strong candidates into teaching, develop relevant and usable knowledge, train teachers extensively in that knowledge, and support these efforts through a strong welfare state.
This book exhibits a collection of proposals for how school curriculum may be conceived, designed, and realized. These proposals are drawn from writers both past and present who have presented some particular vision of what curriculum could be like for Pre-K--12 schools and have sought to convince others to adopt their proposal for use in some actual school situation. The proposals differ from one another in a variety of ways, including in their purposes, their contents, and their perspectives, and thus pose a wealth of options for consideration by those who are planning to change their school curriculum to something new and more suitable for their particular clientele. Readers will need to ...
This book examines the idea of educational accountability, which has become a new secular gospel. But do accountability policies actually make schools better? Do business management theories and practices make organizations more effective? What if the most widely used management theories and assessment tools don’t work? What if educational accountability tools don’t actually measure what they’re supposed to? What if accountability data isn’t valid, or worse, what if it’s meaningless? What if administrators don’t know how to use accountability tools or correctly analyze the problematic data these tools produce? What if we can’t measure, let alone accurately assess, what matters ...
In this landmark volume, Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane lay out a meticulously researched case showing how—in a time of spiraling inequality—strategically targeted interventions and supports can help schools significantly improve the life chances of low-income children. The authors offer a brilliant synthesis of recent research on inequality and its effects on families, children, and schools. They describe the interplay of social and economic factors that has made it increasingly hard for schools to counteract the effects of inequality and that has created a widening wedge between low- and high-income students. Restoring Opportunity provides detailed portraits of proven initiative...