Unlike the effective teaching research, which attempted to identify generic teaching skills, current research focuses on relationships between teaching and learning in specific subjects. Attempts to change school structure have rarely led to reliable changes in either teaching practice or student learning. When geared to students' conceptual…

School organization and incentive structures help thwart large-scale adoption of innovative educational practices. Evidence from the progressive movement and past curriculum reform efforts suggest that wide-scale reforms are ineffective under current conditions. Change requires external normative structures, organizations that focus intrinsic…

As part of its school restructuring work with states, the National Governors' Association sponsored a March 1988 working meeting of experts to define common issues confronting educators and policymakers. Besides initiating dialogue between these groups, the meeting concentrated discussion on early state and district efforts. This essay summarizes…

Speculates about connections among educators' ideas of best practice, school organization, and policy. Develops six principles of best educational practice. These connect to organization and policy through resolving four recurring problems: how students are grouped, how teachers' work is defined, how content is allocated to time, and how student…

The idea that changes in school organization can improve teaching and enhance learning has heavily influenced educational reform over the past decade. With a goal of enabling teachers to promote students' construction of knowledge--so-called "constructivist" teaching--school restructuring has tended to focus on changing: (1) how schools group…

The current debate on educational choice concerns whether locally centralized school systems of the kind that predominate in the public school sector are responsive to and can accommodate the diversity of educational consumers' preferences. Section I analyzes policy options and illustrates how policymakers, by examining a range of solutions to the…