This study examines implementation of college-and-career-ready (CCR) education standards across five school districts in Ohio, Texas, California, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. Drawing on the policy attributes theory, we found that the specificity of districts' approaches to two long-recognized policy levers, curriculum and professional…

Asking practitioners to make larger changes to their practice is often thought to lead to lower fidelity of implementation. However, salient differences between ambitious new reforms and teachers' existing practices may also facilitate processes of conceptual change and correspondingly increase fidelity of implementation. I use survey data on the…

In a common approach for scaling up effective educational practice, schools adopt evidence-based programs to be implemented with fidelity. An alternative approach assumes that programs should be adapted to local contexts. In this randomized trial of a reading intervention, we study a scaffolded sequence of implementation in which schools first…