Extending Educational Reform

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.

ANDY HARGREAVES Department of Teacher Education, Curriculum and Instruction Lynch School of Education, Boston College, MA, U.S.A. ANN LIEBERMAN Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stanford, CA, U.S.A. MICHAEL FULLAN Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada DAVID HOPKINS Department for Education and Skills, London, U.K. This set of four volumes on Educational Change brings together evidence and insights on educational change issues from leading writers and researchers in the field from across the world. Many of these writers, whose chapters have been specially written for these books, have been investigating, helping initiate and implementing educational change, for most or all of their lengthy careers. Others are working on the cutting edge of theory and practice in educational change, taking the field in new or even more challenging directions. And some are more skeptical about the literature of educational change and the assumptions on which it rests. They help us to approach projects of understanding or initiating educational change more deeply, reflectively and realistically. Educational change and reform have rarely had so much prominence within public policy, in so many different places. Educational change is ubiquitous. It figures large in Presidential and Prime Ministerial speeches. It is at or near the top of many National policy agendas. Everywhere, educational change is not only a policy priority but also major public news. Yet action to bring about educational change usually exceeds people's understanding of how to do so effectively.

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.

Fifty years ago, Brown V. Board of Education set in motion a series of legislative and judicial efforts to undo the effects of racial segregation, providing opportunities and support for children who had been denied both. Twenty years ago, the publication of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983) drew attention to the need for reform in all of America's schools to ensure the nation's ability to compete in the international economy. These two forces pressure to improve the quality of schools for all students and pressure to reduce gaps in access and performance of students- have resulted in both a demand for better approaches to teaching and learning and a supply of interventions intended to build the capacity within our schools to serve all children better. On the demand side, the nation has given education a high priority, even in the face of economic downturns and international turmoil. Individual states, some on their own and some under pressure from federal leaders, have revamped their standards, their assessment systems, and the incentives they provide to schools to improve their performance. The federal government, through the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, continues to press for improvements in educational performance within all the many social and ethnic groups in American society and is holding schools accountable for achieving it.

Contemporary public policy assumes that the achievement gap between black and white students could be closed if only schools would do a better job. According to Richard Rothstein, "Closing the gaps between lower-class and middle-class children requires social and economic reform as well as school improvement. Unfortunately, the trend is to shift most of the burden to schools, as if they alone can eradicate poverty and inequality." In this book, Rothstein points the way toward social and economic reforms that would give all children a more equal chance to succeed in school. This book features: a summary of numerous studies linking school achievement to health care quality, nutrition, childrearing styles, housing stability, parental economic security, and more ; aA look at erroneous and misleading data that underlie commonplace claims that some schools "beat the demographic odds and therefore any school can close the achievement gap if only it adopted proper practices." ; and an analysis of how the over-emphasis of standardized tests in federal law obscures the true achievement gap and makes narrowing it more difficult.

This volume offers critical analysis of national school reform policies intended to align with global agendas to promote educational quality and equity. By uniquely foregrounding the need for education reform to nurture child well-being alongside traditional measures of academic achievement, the book identifies common challenges across the Global North and South and extends insights provided by international student assessment data. Chapters offer a close analysis of reform practices in countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas to consider cultural, social, political, and functional aspects which drive or inhibit the success of reform initiatives. Providing excellent insights into holistic education for children and youth, this book highlights lessons to support global efforts in providing high-quality, equitable education for the whole child. Developing international knowledge and supplementing international data, this volume will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers with an interest in education policy, as well as comparative and international education.

This book, the 14th yearbook of the American Education Finance Association (AEFA), provides a review and appraisal of the "educational perestroika" that has occurred over the past decade, both in the United States and in other developed countries. Rather than assessing the outcomes of a decade of educational reform, it examines the present and future of educational reform. Part 1 contains seven chapters that explore reform initiatives in the United States, while the second part is comprised of four chapters that examine reform initiatives abroad. Part 3 considers the future of school reform. Following the preface, the chapters include: (1) "School Reform in the United States: Putting It into Context" (Susan H. Fuhrman, Richard F. Elmore, and Diane Massell); (2) "Cooperative Performance Incentives in Education" (Craig E. Richards, Daniel Fishbein, and Paula Melville); (3) "'Professionalizing' Teaching by Expanding Teachers' Roles" (Betty Malen); (4) "Decentralization and Community Control" (G. Alfred Hess, Jr.); (5) "Negotiating Reform: Preliminary Findings" (Julia E. Koppich and Charles Taylor Kerchner); (6) "Educational Choice: Competing Models and Meanings" (Bruce S. Cooper); (7) "Cost Analysis as a Tool for Education Reform" (David H. Monk and Jennifer A. King); (8) "International School Reform: Political Considerations" (Frances C. Fowler, William L. Boyd, and David N. Plank); (9) "Pursuit of School Quality in England and Wales" (Peter Ribbins and Hywel Thomas); (10) "Benevolence in Canadian Public Schools" (Daniel J. Brown); (11) "Educational Transformations in a 'United' Germany" (Wolfgang Mitter and Manfred Weiss); and (12) "School Reform and the 'New World Order'" (James W. Guthrie). A subject and author index are included. The appendix contains a list of the AEFA Board of Directors, 1993-94. (LMI)

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.