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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.
As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six ...
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.
Thrive explores the purpose of education in a transforming world and how young people can thrive in this unpredictable environment.
"School reforms are almost always born out of big dreams and a well-meaning desire to change the status quo-the American education system as we know it was the product of such a reform. But between the lawmakers who spearhead these changes and the students whose education is at stake, there are countless teachers, principals, administrators, and local politicians and, correspondingly, countless ways that things can go sideways. In Reforming the Reform, political scientist Susan Moffitt, education scholar Michaela O'Neill, and the late policy and education scholar David K. Cohen take on a wide-ranging examination of the nitty-gritty of school reform. They focus especially on mezzo-level actor...
A compelling overview of the major debates in contemporary education policy. In statehouses, school boards, and communities across the US, battles are raging over the direction of education policy--from the standards that are shaping what students learn to how test results are being used to judge a teacher's performance. These battles are being waged against a backdrop of shifting demographics, rapidly developing technology, a transforming economy and workplace. What's more, the COVID-19 pandemic is prompting educators to rethink the school's mission in society. In The Education Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know®, nationally recognized education authority David Kirp and Kevin Macpherson p...
This text provides comprehensive coverage of the key methods for analyzing, interpreting, and writing up qualitative research in a single volume, and drawing on the expertise of major names in the field. Covering all the steps in the process of analyzing, interpreting, and presenting findings in qualitative research, the authors utilize a consistent chapter structure that provides novice and seasoned researchers with pragmatic, "how-to" strategies. Each chapter introduces the method; uses one of the authors′ own research projects as a case study of the method described; shows how the specific analytic method can be used in other types of studies; and concludes with questions and activities to prompt class discussion or personal study.
In the continuing quest to turnaround the lowest performing schools, rapid and sustainable reform, or school turnaround, seems most elusive for secondary schools. Secondary schools are rife with challenges due to their wide-ranging mission and organizational complexity. With the continued emphasis on college and career readiness and the vast learning possibilities enhanced by technology, our third book in this series, Contemporary Perspectives on School Turnaround and Reform, focuses on rapid school turnaround and reform in secondary schools. In this edited volume, researchers and scholars consider the doubly perplexing challenge of school turnaround or the rapid improvement of the lowest-pe...
The concept of school turnaround—rapidly improving schools and increasing student achievement outcomes in a short period of time—has become politicized despite the relative newness of the idea. Unprecedented funding levels for school improvement combined with few examples of schools substantially increasing student achievement outcomes has resulted in doubt about whether or not turnaround is achievable. Skeptics have enumerated a number of reasons to abandon school turnaround at this early juncture. This book is the first in a new series on school turnaround and reform intended to spur ongoing dialogue among and between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners on improving the lowest...
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 ...