Jobs for the Future's (JFF) vision for the Big Blur calls for entirely new educational institutions and systems to better prepare 16-to-20-year-olds for college and careers. This paper examines the new type of governance needed to help states create more effective grade 11-14 schools and systems by erasing the arbitrary dividing line between high…

Charter public schools began as the "research and development" alternative to traditional public schools over 20 years ago, but today they account for significant portions of student enrollment in many cities. In more than 190 districts across the country, charter school attendance makes up at least 10 percent of public school student…

This article explores a research partnership between a university-based researcher and a middle school science teacher. Our partnership began with project-based inquiry and continued with unstructured thought-partner spaces: meetings with no agenda where we wrestled with problems of practice. Framed as incubation periods, these meetings allowed us…

A public, Catholic, and charter school in Boston all work together to share their strengths and learn from each other in an effort to deliver the best education for all of their students. The arrangement is called the School Performance Partnership, and it is a grantee of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

America's institutions of higher education have been challenged to develop new strategies to improve the success of all students. With more and more students attending multiple institutions, improving the transfer process is key to ensuring all students succeed. AAC&U launched the Quality Collaboratives (QC) project in 2011 with support from…

For the 12 years that Michael Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, the Big Apple was home to the nation's largest experiment in implementing the business model of education reform. The numbers of public school closings and new charter schools soared, while the high school student assignment system was overhauled to be driven by choice. By the…

This study describes core dispositions of school district superintendents who have been identified as technology savvy leaders by a prominent educational technology newspaper. The superintendents in this study described how they accomplished their technology initiatives and offered suggestions for other superintendents who aspire to be more…

In the field of medicine, research and practice are joined in teaching hospitals. In these institutions, researchers work alongside doctors to incorporate recent advances in medical research into practice and track results. There is a growing movement in the field of education to create analogous institutions in education called research schools.…

Renaissance School is part of a network of Expeditionary Learning (EL) schools that was borne of a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Outward Bound, USA. The EL model is centered on the Outward Bound ethic of having youth work together to achieve a task. EL schools take an approach to teaching and learning that…

As New England and the nation at large become obsessed with "college completion," there is a leak in the pipeline. Many students leave high school who are not "college ready." These students, upon entering college, are often steered toward "remedial" courses that cost money and time. Remedial courses are also…

College readiness is a social construct requiring both student and adult preparedness. This paper used a case study methodology to explore how teaching in an early college program might promote adult college readiness in the instructors. A community of practice, enhanced by a co-teaching model, in two separate high school settings under one early…

For the first time in the nation's history 46 States and the District of Columbia have agreed that all K-12 students will be educated along a common continuum of high academic expectations known as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Having clear, consistent standards in English language arts/literacy and mathematics will help ensure that all…

Engineering education directly supports the nation's capacity for economic growth, infrastructure renewal, and security, as well as environmental and human health. Numerous reports have recommended federal support to advance our understanding of how students learn, how faculty teach, and how teaching and learning are assessed. The U.S. National…

The authors present the National Science Foundation project, Teachers Investigating Adult Numeracy (TIAN), a collaborative project of the Center for Literacy Studies at the University of Tennessee and the Technical Education Research Centers, Inc. (TERC) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The project has developed and tested a model for inservice…

This article features University Park Campus School, a 7-12 grade school in Worcester, Massachusetts. University Park was created through a partnership between Clark University and Worcester Public Schools. It opened in 1997 as a public school educational alternative for students from the challenging inner-city neighborhood directly adjacent to…