Approximately 75.0% of the students in a district in the Bronx, New York, failed to meet grade level state standards in mathematics The district leadership team had implemented numerous improvement efforts but saw little progress. Grounded in Lave and Wenger's Social Learning Theory, adapting Wenger and Snyder's Community of Practice research, and…

The challenges of transforming our educational systems to fulfill enduring needs for equity, justice, and responsiveness will take a multitude of partners. Research-practice partnerships (RPPs) arrange collaboration and engagement with research to bring about shared commitments and resources to tackle these challenges. Just as sociocultural and…

When Sweden began to experience a steady decline in student achievement results in PISA and TIMMS, the Swedish National Agency of Education initiated a model of collaboration with Swedish universities aimed at providing support to schools with falling student achievement scores. In this article, we examine how such projects can work at the local…

Research Informed Teaching Practice has become a fundamental aspect of educational reform in the modern world, aiding the development and improvement of teaching and learning, decision-making and the school improvement agenda in general. This article presents the findings from a small-scale study across three infant schools in England involving 15…

This article provides an evaluative account of its authors' involvement in three major national improvement initiatives. Set in the context of three of the countries that make up the UK, these developments were focused in particular on the promotion of educational equity. Unusually, the analysis provided compares evidence collected from an insider…

"Gary B. v. Snyder," a federal class action lawsuit originally filed in September 2016, is one of the most recent and high-profile entrants into the line of cases involving large-scale education reform. In this case, seven students from traditional public schools and charter schools in Detroit sued various Michigan state officials,…

Continuous improvement, a structured process for using data and research to improve educational programming, is an important component in creating and maintaining successful CTE programs. For practitioners to engage in continuous improvement--and to use data and research to go beyond accountability--they need to maintain an effective data…

By partnering with researchers, state CTE administrators have the opportunity to better understand CTE programming and practices across their states. This is the fourth in a series of six practitioner training modules developed as part of the Career & Technical Education (CTE) Research Network Lead. Designed for CTE practitioners and state…

In recent years, we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems and the incremental growth of school choice options for families--but little appetite for big and bold new initiatives. To be sure, there are still fights--battles in state legislatures between reform…

This article examines the impetus for schools to engage in and with evidence in England's self-improving school system. It begins with an examination of how the education policy environment has changed, shifting from predominantly top-down approaches to school improvement to the current government's focus on schools themselves sourcing and sharing…

Improving performance is a high stakes undertaking for schools who are operating within highly prescriptive testing and inspection regimes and a dynamic policy environment requiring Senior Leaders to be innovative and well-informed regarding best practice both nationally and internationally. In this context there can be a tendency to fall back on…

The demand for students to continue studying STEM subjects at post-16 and higher education levels remains high. Since the curriculum reforms in Science and Mathematics across phases in England were initiated in 2014, uncertainty remains on the impact that these reforms will have on students and teachers as the reforms continue to be implemented…

It is well documented that classroom observation reports are used by school leaders as just one piece of the clinical supervision process of teachers (Cohen and Goldhaber, 2016). While the frequency of classroom observations might vary between school districts, recent regulations on Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) have added more…

Researcher-practitioner partnerships have gained increasing prominence within education in recent years, yet scholarship on partnerships and tools to guide partnerships' work remain in their infancy. Drawing on our own work in a partnership as well as analysis of abstracts for the 41 partnerships funded by the Institute of Education Sciences and…

American Educational Research Association presidents' presidential addresses have only intermittently considered relevance as a criterion of quality for education research. A few, though, argued that education research could only distinguish itself from research in the disciplines through attention to improving educational outcomes. David…