"Improving Education Together" offers a step-by-step guide to Labor-Management-Community (LMC) collaboration, an intervention that has successfully improved student outcomes in a wide variety of school districts across the country. The authors illustrate how a culture of collaboration between labor, management, and community stakeholders…

This resource was prepared in response to a request from a Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) State for information about the Transformation Zones that 10 RTT-ELC States had included as key projects in their RTT-ELC plans. This information will be helpful to other States as they consider how to continue to increase the quality of…

One of the driving forces behind the design of the Pathways to Results (PTR) initiative is to dismantle and redesign systems to produce equitable outcomes. This notion of systems producing the exact outcomes for which they were designed can also be applied to the Pathways to Results methodology itself. After five years of leading PTR initiatives…

The Schools to Watch: School Transformation Network Project is a whole school reform model designed to improve the educational practices, experiences, and outcomes of low-performing middle-grades schools. Developed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded in 2010 by a U.S. Department of Education…

As cities across the country and globe continue to generate new solutions to a wide variety of vexing problems, sharing information about what works and what doesn't has become more important than ever. Yet, outside of a few prominent policies, the vast majority of successful municipal experiments never reach a national audience or, for that…

Making Connections was the Annie E. Casey Foundation's signature place-based, community-change initiative of the 2000s. It sought to build on previous work and launch an effort focused firmly on the framework of family strengthening. The Foundation started Making Connections in 22 places, focusing eventually on first 10, then seven sites. It…

Response to intervention (RTI) protocols at the secondary level require a systems approach that is supported by professional learning teams (PLTs). PLTs create viable courses in which most students experience success and work together to plan further interventions. PLT protocol work begins with the design of uniform summative assessments and is…

This case study offers an in-depth look at how one school achieved change in its culture and in its approach to curriculum and instruction. The unit of analysis for this single case study is South Loop Elementary School (SLES) and the time period is from August 2002 to June of 2007, during which SLES students demonstrated sharply improved…

An Illinois elementary school principal realized that the district's "yellow tablet" teacher-evaluation system was not working. In lieu of observations by the principal, teachers agreed to visit one another, sometimes in teams, and the principal volunteered to substitute for observing teachers. The new process demolished barriers between…

This report profiles the state departments of education (SEAs) in Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, and North Dakota. These SEAs reported in 1996 that they had changed from a departmental structure (e.g., separate units for special education), into cross-cutting teams in the previous five years. Findings indicate that since…

Since 1990, over 40 Illinois and Massachusetts school districts have built capacity for sustained improvement through vertically structured, district-level Learning Leadership Teams. Originated by Motorola executives, LLT was based on an understanding of organizational change derived from the National Science Foundation's definition of systemic…