In January 2011, teams of government education leaders and grantmakers from 13 states convened for Moving Forward with a Transformative Education Agenda: Practical Solutions for States and Districts, a first-ever national discussion of how grantmakers and state and local education officials might work together to promote elementary and secondary…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change.This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

This study examined how one state approached the integration of policy and practice by forming communities of practice (CoP), defined as groups of people who share a set of problems and interact regularly to solve them (Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002). Policymakers have created strategies known as technical assistance (TA) to bridge the…

This study highlights the problems facing the inspectors of education as quality assurance agents and discusses ways of solving them in order to improve the quality of education in Nigerian schools. The study adopted a qualitative method to collect data from both federal and state inspectors of education in Edo State. Data was collected from the…

State and local educators encountered both opportunities and obstacles in their first year of implementing the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). In 2009, the ARRA, better known as the economic stimulus package, provided $3 billion for SIGs to help reform persistently low-achieving…

South Carolina made a significant step forward in middle level education reform by enacting middle level teacher certification in 2001. This qualitative case study documents the process through which the state legislation developed, with a particular focus on how middle level teacher certification arrived and remained on the public policy agenda…

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…