The term "college and career ready" has become widely used as a result of the proposed Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization and Common Core State Standards movement. As schools move toward what may be considered a moral and economic imperative for the nation's students, it is essential that they first identify the gaps of…

This study draws from 4 years of qualitative case study data to describe how programmatic and district factors interacted to affect reform sustainability in two school districts--one urban and the other suburban. These districts have been implementing a reform developed by the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) for over a decade. NNPS…

Interest in setting high educational standards is at the forefront of many school reform programs in the United States. States' pursuit of high standards can be advanced through implementation of programs such as High Schools That Work ("HSTW"), which emphasizes high expectations and rigorous academics for all students, including Career…

For the first time in the nation's history 46 States and the District of Columbia have agreed that all K-12 students will be educated along a common continuum of high academic expectations known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Having clear, consistent standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics will help ensure that all…

Almost immediately after he was named Commissioner of Education in March 2011, Stephen Bowen traveled to school districts across Maine and spoke to students, teachers, school administrators and community members about what they saw as the challenges confronting Maine's schools and what role they saw for the Maine Department of Education in…

School improvement and reform efforts frequently involve the adoption of a new curriculum program. This article examines the factors that influence program selection when schools have freedom to choose as opposed to having programs mandated by district, state, or national education authorities. Survey and document analysis are used to examine the…

Three different "logics"--that of the internal strategies of the institutions, the economic pressures of the socialist market economy and the political policies of the state drive the development of a university. The dynamic interaction and coexistence of the three logics has determined the transformation models of teacher-education or…

During the 2008-2009 school year, faculty members at New Fairfield (CT) Middle School examined relevance and student engagement in relation to student achievement. Subtle clues indicated that students were not fully engaged in their learning: many students did not relate their classroom experiences to their personal reality or to their vision of…

Framed by sociocultural learning perspectives, this study examines whether embedded learning opportunities for teachers are more supportive of reflective practice than traditional professional development. All schools in this study implemented a comprehensive school reform program. The designs of the programs introduced embedded learning…

The authors conducted a third-party study of the student achievement effects of Struggling Schools, a user-generated approach to Comprehensive School Reform (CSR). The design was a quasiexperimental, pre-post matched sample (N = 180) with school as unit of analysis, drawing on 3 years of achievement data from standardized external assessments.…

The Governor's Educator Excellence Grant (GEEG) program was federally- and state-funded and provided three-year grants to schools to design and implement performance pay plans from the 2005-06 to 2007-08 school years. GEEG was implemented in 99 high poverty, high performing Texas public schools. Performance pay for teachers entered Texas state…

As the identification of students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) continues to increase unabated, there exists a need to provide school personnel with information they can use for the purpose of designing and implementing appropriate comprehensive programs for these students. Accordingly, this article identifies and discusses comprehensive…

This "Fifth-Year Report" from the Evaluation of the Comprehensive School Reform Program Implementation and Outcomes (ECSRIO) is the final report on the outcomes of the federally funded Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) program. It presents findings about the relationship between participation in the U.S. Department of Education's…

Many educational researchers have identified issues on classifying schools and some have made use of ad-hoc classification systems in their analyses; however, these solutions are generally one-dimensional, which prohibits them from capturing the full breadth of variation among schools. To understand the amount of variation that exist in schools…

This article is an edited version of a talk written for delivery at a conference organized to celebrate 50 years of Kidbrooke Comprehensive School with the overall theme "The Comprehensive Ideal: Taking It Beyond the Individual School." Having honored the pioneering work at Kidbrooke, Clyde Chitty then takes a close look at three key issues: the…