Charter schools face high-stakes accountability. When charter schools fail to perform as expected, including as measured on state tests, authorizers are often expected to close them. While the details of charter school oversight are shaped by each state's charter school policy, federal law influences how states test children and evaluate all…

Trustees face complex choices related to costs and efficiency as they navigate new accountability policies, financial headwinds, and a changing global marketplace for college education. The latest release in a series of trustee guides from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's Institute for Effective Governance, "Bold Leadership, Real…

Purpose: The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) represents a notable shift in K-12 accountability, requiring a more comprehensive approach to assessing school performance and a less prescriptive approach to intervening in low-performing schools. In this article, we seek to leverage the experiences of California's CORE (California Office to Reform…

By all measures, KIPP Comienza Community Prep, an elementary school in Huntington Park, California, is a wildly successful school. And yet, toward the end of the 2015-16 school year, as KIPP Comienza Principal Shirley Appleman and her staff reviewed the school's literacy assessment data, they were troubled: Many students did not demonstrate…

Discussion of alternative education is growing across the country as states and districts look for ways to better serve students whose needs are not met in traditional high school settings. Alternative settings, however, vary greatly in how they operate, whom they aim to enroll, and the methods they use to educate students. The variation of…

In a teacher residency, candidates receive almost all of their training in their future job site: They spend at least a year in a pre-k through 12 classroom under the guidance of a highly effective mentor teacher. This on-the-job experience is complemented by coursework that is tightly linked to and builds upon their experiences in the classroom.…

Although a growing body of work addresses the current role of neoliberalism in displacing democratic equality as a goal of public education, attempts to parse such impacts rarely draw from historical accounts. At least one tenet of neoliberalism--the application of business models to public institutions--was also pervasive at the turn of the 20th…

Enterprise software implementations are subject to high failure rates. Organizations of higher education can be particularly resistant to technology implementations as they can be perceived as eroding the traditions of the institution. The California State University (CSU) system is moving into a new phase of data-driven accountability for…

At KIPP Comienza Community Prep--an elementary school in Huntington Park, California, where 94 percent of students qualify for free lunch, and more than 60 percent are English language learners--most kindergarteners start out well below pre-reading levels. In 2015, however, just a few years after these students walked in the school doors unable to…

The current wave of educational reform is complex and situated in market-based initiatives coupled with a renewed emphasis on local autonomy, deliberation, and community--middle-of-the-road reforms. In practice, schools are challenged to develop organizational forms that can support collaboration and community engagement, alongside the…

The First Amendment Schools project holds rich lessons in how to change school cultures into "laboratories of democracy"--as well as in how to increase the odds of success for any school reform effort. School reform programs of any sort need to make sure to build in sustainability, to provide ways to spread their lessons beyond the…

This study aims to inform the California Department of Education (CDE) in ensuring the standards contained in Title 5 appropriately promote the planning and design of healthy, safe and educationally suitable K-12 school facilities. The study gathers and analyzes K-12 facility standards in ten case study states across the country to understand…

The purpose of this study was to inform the California Department of Education (CDE) in ensuring the standards contained in Title 5 appropriately promote the planning and design of healthy, safe and educationally suitable K-12 school facilities. The study gathers and analyzes K-12 facility standards in other states across the country to understand…

The purpose of this paper is to enhance our understanding of districts that are implementing sustainable professional learning in data-driven decision-making (DDDM) to improve student achievement. The data-informed leadership framework, comprised of leadership practices that acknowledge the complexities that play into data use, guided the inquiry.…

U.S. education has experienced many waves of reform in responding to rapid changes in knowledge, technologies, and the economy. It is now widely accepted that, to succeed in the future, all young people must have the opportunity to develop critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication competencies--often referred to as…