Four principles emerged from 1980s reforms that should guide scaling-up strategies in California and elsewhere. School improvement efforts must be designed to create active, thinking curriculum in specific disciplines; success should be judged by whether increasing numbers of students reach agreed-upon performance goals. Initiatives should be…

Examines the school district's role in implementing and maintaining the essential elements of a nine-year statewide improvement project called SPUR (Louisiana's Special Plan Upgrading Reading) five years after the termination of state funding and external support. Onsite visits and survey results indicate that SPUR represents a feasible…

Montana Improving Schools Through Accreditation (MISTA) is a pilot program that empowers schools to attain accreditation through their own visions of improved student learning. Termed "performance-based accreditation," this process is voluntary and represents a consensus among the regional accrediting agency, the state education agency,…

Serious interest in reducing class size often begins with a key question: What available evidence would support the higher implementation costs? This article discusses positive results of a longitudinal statewide study in Tennessee (Project STAR) and uses findings to specify four guidelines for practitioners and policy makers. Evaluation plans…

Describes Minnesota's landmark Bleacher Safety Act, enacted after a 6-year-old fell to his death from bleachers, and the efforts and recommendations of other states and organizations regarding bleacher safety. (EV)

Over the past two years, the U.S. Department of Education's (ED) has made such extensive compromises in implementing the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)that the law's legitimacy is in serious question. In response to growing state and local opposition to the law, political and professional criticisms of its requirements, and the…

This article reports how calls are being renewed to tighten the state standards as states feel pressured to revisit them. Two prominent national organizations, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) and the National Research Council (NRC), have declared in the past month that "less is more" in state standards for what students…

This paper presents information to be used by school-leadership teams engaged in the development of school-improvement plans. It reviews recent literature on shared leadership and collaborative schools, school-improvement teams, school culture, and effective schools/positive learning environments. The paper also identifies school-level and…

When states prepare their budgets, they usually base revenue and expenditure projections upon forecasts of national and state economic and demographic trends. This brief presents findings of a Center for the Study of the States survey that asked state budget offices what they were assuming for many key variables. The survey obtained 41 state…

In the past 2 decades, the United States has had a more troubled experience in establishing common standards and decentralized authority than comparable school systems in other cultures. This paper describes how the National Center for Education and Economy (NCEE) has been working through the National Alliance (NA) for Restructuring Education to…

In every state of the United States, efforts are under way to improve the way education is provided; however, no single reform strategy dominates. This document summarizes major statewide reforms under way in each of the 50 states. The impetus for reform, the driving agencies or institutions behind reform, as well as the intended results, vary…

The efforts of states to differentiate regulatory treatment among districts and schools are examined in this paper. Data were derived from case studies of four state programs: Kentucky's Educational Deficiency Program of receivership for troubled districts; New Jersey's Plan to Intervene in Deficient School Districts; South Carolina's Flexibility…

Charter schools are a growing phenomenon in American education. This legislative update provides information on the four states--Idaho, Missouri, Virginia, and Utah--that enacted charter-school laws during the 1998 legislative session, as well as information on legislative changes in other states with charter-school legislation. Charter schools…

During 1993, various teachers and schools in Indiana were recognized for high achievement with awards called "Bellringers," for educational efforts that truly "ring the bell." This "report card" documents the activities of the Indiana Department of Education for the 1992-1993 school year. The first section offers an…

This reexamination of Hawaii's student transportation service program revealed that student safety is a concern despite improvements over the past 12 years. One problem is continued use of pre-1977 school buses that do not meet federal safety construction standards. Students also travel in unsafe van-like "type-III" school buses and in…