In "School Rethink 2.0," editors Frederick M. Hess, Michael B. Horn, and Juliet Squire gather leaders immersed in the nuts-and-bolts work of educational reinvention to present ten promising education improvements and ways to implement them. Contributors, including acclaimed education pioneers Sal Khan, Beth Rabbitt, and Larry Berger,…

Across the country, urban school districts are moving beyond industrial-era systems by creating "innovation" or "partnership" schools that have the freedom to reinvent the way they educate students. The Progressive Policy Institute released a how-to guide for legislators, district leaders, and advocates who want to create more…

Schools are learning organisations. They continuously strive to do better for the children and young people in their charge. In doing so, they try new things, seek to learn from those experiences, and work to adopt and embed the practices that work best. Implementation is a key aspect of what schools do to improve, and yet it is a domain of school…

Providing an in-depth look at the processes, pitfalls, and successes that can emerge from major education reform efforts at the state level, this volume covers the full policy change cycle in the development and transformation of the Illinois principal preparation program. Offering perspectives from the major stakeholder groups involved in…

The growing prominence of value-added models for measuring teacher effectiveness has prompted a recent surge in policies that consider students' classroom performance part of a teacher's evaluation. Yet, in light of the criticism and limitations of the current models, whether and how evaluation systems will adapt over time is unclear. This paper…

Increasing attention to "Implementation Research" and the "Implementation Problem" has given rise to confusion about matters such as the role of "empirically-supported practices," "fidelity of implementation," and "monitoring fidelity of implementation." To clarify the matters, we approach these topics from the broad perspective of efforts to…

In December 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB), as the nation's major law governing public schools. ESSA retains the requirement that states test all students in reading and math in grades three through eight and once in high school, as well as the requirement that…

This report is designed to help state and local policymakers identify the policy changes needed to expand access to quality personalized learning in their states and communities, and to give them the tools to make those changes. Each of the 15 policy ideas, or "plays," in this playbook provides background context on the challenges it is…

Communities across the country are grappling with different approaches to improving their schools. Introducing or expanding charter schools is one of the approaches that states and school districts have considered or implemented. Charter schools serve more than 5 percent of public school students nationwide and make up close to 7 percent of all…

Standards drive critical elements of the American educational system--the curricula that schools follow, the textbooks students read, and the tests they take. Similarly, standards establish the levels of performance that students, teachers and schools are expected to meet. To succeed in the 21st century, all students will need to perform to high…

Technological innovation is driving fundamental changes in all aspects of our lives. This is especially true of digital content, as our use of e-books, downloadable music, streaming television and movies, and online social networks has exploded. However, the explosive growth in our use of digital content seems so far to have eluded many of the 50…

"Scale Up in Education, Volume 1: Ideas in Principle" examines the challenges of "scaling up" from a multidisciplinary perspective. It brings together contributions from disciplines that routinely take promising innovations to scale, including medicine, business, engineering, computing, and education. Together the contributors explore appropriate…

This paper offers a case history of one university academic department's experience with the pressure to create online scholarship opportunities for professional educators. As tertiary education transforms its course delivery to Web-based learning management platforms, instructors are challenged to transform career-long practice suddenly and…

The dramatic and increasing availabilty of relatively cheap computer power has led people to tout microcomputers as the solution to education and training problems. However, such panaceas for educational problems fail because they do not address the real ingredients for successful instruction or the problems of large-scale implementation.…

This report identifies factors that have an influence on the successful institutionalization and transfer of innovative uses of telecommunications. It examines which factors promote or deter the institutionalization of demonstration projects in the public service field, as well as alternative strategies for institutionalization and innovation…