The Race to the Top (RTTT) program incentivized states to use innovation for systemwide improvement of student outcomes, but little is known about how RTTT-funded innovation was sustained after the RTTT program ended. This mixed-methods study examined state and district approaches to sustaining an international innovation called "lesson…

U.S. federal policies No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top resulted in a policy overlap that created unique challenges and opportunities for administrators. This study examined principals' perceptions of an overlapping accountability-innovation policy context and their sense of how the policies affected their role as leaders. Primary data for…

In 2012, the United States Department of Education announced the Race to the Top-District grants. One joint award was made to two large educational cooperatives in the same state that together represented 111 mostly rural schools in 22 districts. One of the grant's identified four essential projects was the implementation of personalized learning.…

The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a…