Following a landmark organisational change event within the University of Western Sydney, when the university ceased operating as a federation of four distinct, inter-related elements and merged to become a single entity, four foundation College Managers made a strategic decision to form an alliance. This alliance significantly enhanced the…

Significant attention and resources have been focused on reforming high schools to enhance graduation rates. The research literature supports the following practices: (1) For struggling students, accurate identification and intensive instructional, monitoring, and counseling support; (2) For 9th graders, transition activities, personalization, and…

The National curriculum assessment (NCA) in Wales has evolved from common foundations into a system that is now distinct from that in England. The influence of the political and social milieu of Wales can be seen both in the distinctive features that have been in place from the outset and in the more radical changes introduced since 2002. In this…

Over the past several decades, researchers, politicians, and corporate leaders have focused reform efforts on the size of educational contexts. Hundreds of billions of public and private dollars have been invested to reduce the size and scope of both classrooms and schools (Lee & Ready, 2007). Unlike many education reforms, these downsizing…

Building faculty or professional learning communities is an idea that has come of age. This article describes work being done within the Brigham Young University (BYU)-Public School Partnership to form and sustain such communities across higher and public education and in ways consistent with the four aims of the Agenda for Education in a…

This paper describes an instance of a disadvantaged (urban) Australian government school that realized it had little alternative but to try new approaches; "old ways" were not working. The paper describes an ensemble of school reform practices, philosophies and strategies that give young adolescents genuine ownership of their learning.…

The research objectives were to identify the middle level mathematics teachers' conceptions of mathematics teaching and learning and ascertain changes in their conceptions and instructional behavior at the end of a three-year professional development (PD) project. These changes were studied through the qualitative analysis of their reflective…

Over the last 10 to 15 years, a variety of efforts to transform American high schools have gained both public and private support. Significant among these are initiatives to implement Small Learning Communities (SLCs), part of a larger school reform and restructuring effort designed to address a variety of goals, including "downsizing large…

In 1991, New American Schools (NAS) was established to help schools transform themselves into high-performing organizations. Findings drawn from an implementation analysis of the first 2 years (1995-1997) of a 5-year plan are reported in this book. The plan involved an NAS partnership with 10 jurisdictions, its goal being to increase the number of…

The Leaders for Change Award was established in 1994 to recognize and honor outstanding, long-term corporate commitment to education reform, from preschool through graduate school. A profile of the co-winners of the 1997 award--Chase Manhattan Bank's "Chase Active Learning Program (CAL)" and United Technologies Corporation's…

This paper considers the status and potential of researcher-practitioner collaboration toward higher literacy through a restructured curriculum based on the whole language philosophy. Specifically, it examines the status, contribution, and potential of the dialogue in a whole language topical session on the School Renewal Network, an electronic…

Article examined critical evaluation of the interest-centered curriculum, one in which students meet graduation requirements by accumulating a preestablished number of course units required by their school or department. (Author/RK)

This report explains the Title IX regulations mandating coeducational physical education and describes the resulting successful "new P.E." programs. According to the publication, the "new P.E." is aimed at fulfilling the growth, development, behavior, health-related fitness, and athletic fitness needs of every student. The…

The intent of Title IV-C of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the Education Amendments of 1974) is to establish innovative and exemplary projects that provide creative or imaginative solutions to problems in the areas of supplementary centers and services, health and nutritional demonstrations, and dropout prevention. The purposes of…

This article argues that the failure of meaningful educational reform in Germany is largely a result of the weak performance of educational administrators, which is in turn a result of the absence of formal training for educational administrators. The author first reviews the present state of teacher education in Germany and notes that in 1977…