In 2009, Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) was on the brink of state takeover, with low academic performance, significant achievement gaps, and a number of schools failing to meet performance targets under No Child Left Behind. Additionally, over the past decade, significant demographic shifts in Nashville have resulted in MNPS becoming…

Pioneering research on effective schools more than thirty-five years ago revealed that school leadership is second only to teachers in its impact on student achievement. Underscoring this research, a new study from Annenberg Institute for School Reform (AISR) found that building school administrators' leadership capacity has played a critical role…

The United States Department of Education's (the Department's) "FY 2014 Annual Performance Report" (APR) and "FY 2016 Annual Performance Plan" (APP) provide information relative to the "FY 2014-18 Strategic Plan." Again this year, the Department has consolidated its APR and APP in an effort to provide a more complete…

The Bitara-STEM[TM] Training of Trainer Programme is a short-term professional development programme aimed to increase STEM teachers or facilitators' abilities to teach integrated STEM education and to increase their efficacy, beliefs and attitudes of integrated STEM teaching. The programme involves 35 facilitators, representing a broad spectrum…

It is well documented that the demands on school superintendents have not only become more taxing but have also changed in recent years. The superintendent needs to possess a high degree of knowledge and skills in a diverse number of areas, including psychology, finances, personnel, and general education while functioning at a very high level in…

Everyone--board members, parents, and staff--loves small schools, bur it's no secret that small schools cost more to operate, particularly if administrative and teaching staff cannot be assigned efficiently. If there is a silver lining in this dark contextual cloud, it's that political support for consolidating schools has rarely been better. The…

Over the last 40 years, researchers and educational facilities professionals have learned more about the ways in which the built environment of the school serves as a place where students construct their identities, where occupants create communities for learning, and where the outside community provides both context and support for the schools…

Feeling that social studies has been sidelined by a test-driven focus on math and English/language arts, subject-matter specialists from more than a dozen states met last week with representatives of content-area groups to brainstorm ways to improve academic standards in that subject. The two-day gathering in Charlotte, N.C., is the third convened…

Bobby Fong, was president of Ursinus College until his death in September 2014 and is the only person to have served twice as chair of the AAC&U Board of Directors. In this article, his son Collin presents remarks made at the memorial service for his father. Collin describes his father as a man with a mission, and that mission was to make the…

All too often leadership programs are developed in relative isolation; that is, they tend to be either academic or practitioner in nature. Arguably, much more effective leadership programs are possible through collaboration between academics and practitioners. This application brief describes one such successful collaboration to develop an…

Entrepreneurial leadership, as a distinctive type of leadership required for dealing with challenges and crises of current organizational settings, has increasingly been applied to improve school performance. However, there is limited research on the impact of school leaders' entrepreneurial leadership practices on school innovativeness. The main…

In this article, Shushok, Farquhar-Caddell, and Krimowski, compare the vestiges of old residential environments as introduced in a 1981 article entitled "Invitational Engineering in the Residence Halls" by Jack Murphy and William Purkey ("The Journal of College and University Student Housing," v11 n1 p13-16 Sum 1981) (See in…

This paper is based on data gathered during visits to Uganda and Malawi, conducted by the International Math-teacher Professionalization Using Lesson Study (IMPULS) project and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The author's observations and experiences highlighted misconceptions about lesson study. The paper concludes that some…

This research used data from educators and teacher candidates in Ohio (a state in the Midwestern United States) to produce a valid and reliable instrument for measuring instructional coaching skills. The research involved three pilot tests with large samples of respondents. Initial items came from the extant literature on instructional coaching,…

The current study examined efficient modes for providing standardized feedback to improve performance on an assignment for a second year college class involving writing a brief research proposal. Two forms of standardized feedback (detailed rubric and proposal exemplars) were utilized is an experimental design with undergraduate students (N = 100)…