Scott Hamilton is the Forrest Gump of education reform, although with a lot more IQ points and fewer chocolates. He worked for Bill Bennett in the U.S. Department of Education and for Benno Schmidt at the Edison Project. He authorized charter schools in Massachusetts, co-founded the KIPP network, quadrupled the size of Teach For America (TFA), and…

This 2017 annual report shares many of the accomplishments achieved by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools for the year. 2017 saw improvements to state charter school laws, groundbreaking research projects, and the creation of a new legal action fund that will help to defend and expand access to charter schools. This 2017 Annual…

Susana Velasco always thought she designed lessons for her kindergarten students to help them meet the academic standards for their grade. But now she feels better equipped to adapt instruction to meet the needs of all the children in her class--a skill she has developed through her school's participation in the Literacy Design Collaborative…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

This paper explores, mainly through a socio-cultural perspective, the role of mid-level leadership in higher education in relation to educational development. It is argued that supporting and engaging local-level leaders, such as academic programme directors, increases the potential for development of local teaching and learning cultures. The…

This article integrates two frameworks, Quality Matters (QM) and tenants of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), in the development and implementation of online learning courses. Both of these frameworks are described. This report highlights guidelines and presents an example for creating quality online courses with a combined emphasis on course…

The whoosh bottle rocket car has been redesigned to be more reusable and more robust, making it even easier to use as a demonstration. Enhancements of this demonstration, including the use of heat sensitive ink and electronic temperature probes, enable users to find warmer and cooler regions on the surface of the whoosh bottle.

Large numbers of qualified students do not apply to and enroll in college. Yet, earning a college degree is one of the primary pathways for economic success and is increasingly required for good jobs and high wages. A number of programs and practices aim to improve college readiness and enrollment, including "Take Stock in Children's®…

Nutrient loss and accumulation as well as associated environmental degradation have been a concern for animal agriculture for many decades. Federal and New York (NY) regulations apply to Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and a comprehensive nutrient management plan (CNMP) is required for regulated farms. The whole farm nutrient mass balance…

This article illustrates the value of large-scale impact evaluations with counterfactual components. It begins by exploring the limitations of small-scale impact studies, which do not allow reliable inference to a wider population or which do not use valid comparison groups. The paper then describes the design features of a recent large-scale…

There is growing interest in the ability of improvement science--the systematic study of improvement strategies to identify promising practices for addressing issues in complex systems (Improvement Science Research Network, 2016)--to spur innovation and address complex problems. In education this methodology is often implemented through…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on challenges faced by longitudinal quantitative analyses of school improvement processes and offers a systematic literature review of current papers that use longitudinal analyses. In this context, the authors assessed designs and methods that are used to analyze the relation between school…

Utah's dual language education (DL) initiative, officially introduced in 2007 and backed by unique state-level planning, is touted as a new "mainstreaming" of DL and is sparking interest across the U.S. Using a critical language policy lens and a mixed method approach, we asked which student groups were positioned discursively and…

This article provides a critique and an addition to observations raised by Ballantine et al. in this issue. After reviewing the strengths of Ballantine et al.'s article about the need for a core in sociology, I argue that this debate has gone on long enough and needs to be reframed around areas of agreement. Three major curricular projects (that…

Teaching children to get along with others, care about themselves, and actively participate in learning are three of the most important outcomes of the schooling process. Yet children in some schools are not achieving these outcomes, and many educators have not received adequate training to create instructional environments that facilitate these…