This volume centres the notion of "chance" in education as a key concept in contemporary education -- relating to aspects like accountability, datafication, or international large-scale assessments -- and discusses the impact that the historical desire to "tame" this notion has had on present-day educational policy and…

Coaching is a form of professional learning that can contextualize learning and personalize the development of knowledge and skills to improve professional practice and the student experience. Coaching for equity-oriented continuous improvement needs be defined differently than instructional coaching since the schools are focused on changing…

What guidance does research provide about how to improve school district performance in the United States? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership perspectives) and research design (primarily qualitative case…

Collective efficacy has become a prominent feature in educational policy and practice with growing evidence that a strong sense of collective efficacy amongst educators leads to better outcomes for students. With growing interest in the importance of collective efficacy and how to cultivate it, the Collective Efficacy Tracking Tool was created to…

Educational analytics tend toward aggregation, asking what a "normative" learner does. In "The Left Hand of Data," educational researchers Matthew Berland and Antero Garcia start from a different assumption--that outliers are, and must be treated as, valued individuals. Berland and Garcia argue that the aim of analytics should…

This national snapshot presents findings on the current use of evidence by teachers and leaders in Australian schools. The authors examine attitudes towards and use of various types of evidence, and challenges and enablers in using evidence. In examining the use of evidence, they distinguish between: (1) research evidence: academic research, such…

Education practice often requires teachers and other school personnel to adapt interventions over time in order to address between-student heterogeneity in response to intervention (e.g., what works for one student may not work for the other) or within-student heterogeneity (e.g., what works now may not work in the future for the same student). An…

The policy decisions of state, district and school educators affect the extent to which students have access to high-quality practices. This is especially relevant for students with disabilities and their families. This article summarizes a presentation made at the 2019 AAIDD conference and proposes an operational role for policy makers. Two…

Amid rising concerns in recent decades about the performance, equity, and efficiency of education systems, policy-makers worldwide have sought to reform educational governance. Key reform elements include standardized testing, teacher monitoring and evaluation, and accountability, often in combination with other features such as decentralization…

After decades of accountability and market-based reforms in education, school systems are now organizing more around improving teaching and learning. Yet these efforts frequently yield unintended, superficial, or even counterproductive changes at the school level. In this article, Maxwell Yurkofsky develops the concept of technical ceremonies as a…

Schools have drastically changed the way that staff, students, families, and communities engage with one another due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools begin planning education for fall, states are in the process of developing guidance and support for districts and schools to navigate students' and adults' academic, social, emotional, and…

In this chapter the authors provide an overview of the evidence-for-education landscape across countries. Although the importance of using evidence to inform policy and practice in education was identified over 20 years ago, many education systems are still struggling to make this a reality. The enormous expansion of publicly available data on…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

Accurately evaluating what works -- and what doesn't -- to improve student progression through higher education requires the robust use of reliable data. States play a pivotal role in compiling and using data to empower student choice, spur continuous institutional and system improvement, and develop evidence-based solutions that promote college…

This publication is part of the "Leading by Exemplar" project, a multi-year study conducted by Bellwether Education Partners. In this project, every aspect of the Head Start exemplars' program design and practice was closely examined in an effort to understand each program's "secret sauce." Leading by Exemplar has three goals:…