Expanding The Reach Of Education Reforms

How does one spread a successful educational reform? The essays here recount the authors?' experiences with the scale-up process. Among their lessons are the importance of building the capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure, and fostering a sense of ownership. The process is iterative and complex and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals.

Over the last few decades, demands that schools serve all students better and be accountable for student performance have inspired many education reforms. Meanwhile, the focus has shifted from assisting individual teachers and schools to applying proven reforms more widely-scale-up. The authors of the essays in this volume have helped extend various reforms beyond the environments in which they first proved successful. The authors recount the challenges they faced and the lessons they learned. One major challenge has been building the capacity in schools, districts, and states both to implement and to sustain the reforms. Some elements of successful scale-ups are adjusting programs for differing cultural and policy environments, implementing quality-control mechanisms, ensuring that all supports are in place (including financing), and fostering a sense of ownership. Success with any design requires participants at all levels-developers, teachers, schools, districts, and states-to cooperate in an iterative and complex and process that, among other things, aligns the program with local accountability requirements and provides the policies and infrastructure that will sustain the practices for the long term.

Annotation. How does one spread a successful educational reform? The essays here recount the authors' experiences with the scale-up process. Among their lessons are the importance of building the capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure, and fostering a sense of ownership. The process is iterative and complex and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals.

In an effort to improve student achievement, thousands of US schools have adopted school reform models devised externally by universities and other organizations. Such models have been successful in improving individual schools or groups of schools, but what happens when educational reform attempts to extend from one school to many? Through qualitative data from several studies, this book explores what happens when school reform 'goes to scale'. Topics covered include: *why and how schools are adopting reforms *the influence of the local context and wider constraints on the implementation of reform *teachers and principals as change agents in schools *the evolution of reform design teams *the implementation, sustainability and expiration of reform, and its impact on educational change Each chapter concludes with guidelines for policy and practice. This book will be of interest to educational leaders and staff developers, educational researchers and policy makers, in the US and internationally.

A major transformation of Chinese higher education (HE) has taken place over the past decade – China has reshaped its higher education sector from elite to mass education with the number of graduates having quadrupled to three million a year over six years. China is exceptional among lower income countries in using tertiary education as a development strategy on such a scale, aiming to improve the quality of its graduates, and make HE available to as many of its citizens as possible. This book provides a critical examination the challenges to the development and sustainability of higher education in China: Can its universities move from quantity to quality? How will so many graduates find jobs in line with their expectations? Can Britain and other western countries continue to benefit from China’s education boom? What are the prospects for collaboration in research? This book evaluates the prospects for Chinese and foreign HE providers, regulators and other stakeholders. It introduces the key changes in China’s HE programme since the Opening-Up policy in 1978 and analyses the achievements and the challenges over the subsequent three decades. Furthermore, it sheds light on new reforms that are likely to take place in the future, particularly as a result of the ongoing international financial crisis.

Ideology and Educational Reform traces the underlying ideological problems that make genuine educational reform difficult. It describes three major themes in public education: common school, human capital, and clientelism.

This open access book is a comparative analysis of recent large scale education reforms that broadened curriculum goals to better prepare students for the 21st century. The book examines what governments actually do when they broaden curriculum goals, with attention to the details of implementation. To this end, the book examines system level reforms in six countries at various levels of development. The study includes system level reforms in jurisdictions where students achieve high levels in international assessments of basic literacies, such as Singapore and Ontario, Canada, as well as in nations where students achieve much lower levels, such as Kenya, Mexico, Punjab-Pakistan and Zimbabwe. The chapters examine system-level reforms that focus on strengthening the capacity to teach the basics, as in Ontario and Pakistan, as well as reforms that aim at building the capacity to teach a much broader set of competencies and skills, such as Kenya, Mexico, Singapore and Zimbabwe. The volume includes systems at very different levels of spending per student and reforms at various points in the cycle of policy implementation, some just starting, some struggling to survive a governmental transition, and others that have been in place for an extended period of time. From the comparative study of these reforms, we aim to provide an understanding of how to build the capacity of education systems to teach 21st century skills at scale in diverse settings.

This book envisions the formulation of critical perspectives on education reform using the Philippine experience, recognizing the need to address relevant issues and challenges particularly in an increasingly globalized twenty-first century setting. A specific education reform project, the Leaders and Educators in Asia Programme (LEAP), a joint effort between the Philippines’ Department of Education, the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, the National Institute of Education-Singapore and Singapore’s Temasek Foundation, serves as the analytical focus of how education reform as a globalized movement is implemented, interpreted and made sense of by stakeholders involved in the reform project. This inquiry proposes to examine the problematique of education reform – from a Philippine perspective – by focusing on three analytical starting points: (1) describing the most relevant and urgent issues of education reform; (2) diagnosing the causes and consequences of reform failures; and (3) developing critical and contextualized perspectives on reform trajectories. Mapping the Terrain of Education Reforms: Global trends and local responses in the Philippines discusses the following: Challenges against effective education reforms The oscillation between global and local imperatives The dissociation between policymakers and practitioners Education reform aid in the Philippines This book will be of interest to researchers interested in education policy, politics, and reforms. It will also appeal to scholars examining Asian, and particularly Southeast Asian, educational systems.