Public schools in Pennsylvania are required to provide English Language Development (ELD) instruction to all English Language Learners (ELs) in content classes through collaboration between classroom teachers and English as a Second Language (ESL) specialists (Pennsylvania Department of Education, 2017, July 1). There are many barriers to…

Pennsylvania Intermediate Unit 8 (IU8) seeks to scale innovations that are evolving as local solutions to educational challenges in rural school districts. Consistent with its mission of creating customized solutions, IU8 seeks to make the innovations better, meaning more learner centered and community focused. IU8 is evolving the Getting Better…

Over the past two decades, community organizing has emerged as an effective force for school improvement. In the context of shrinking education funding, stubborn opportunity and achievement gaps between low-income and wealthy children and between children of color and White children, and polarizing debate on school reform, community organizing…

This report concludes that for the U.S. to prosper and compete in the 21st century, the education system will need to change its goals and practices so all students may succeed. That is, as information has become ubiquitous, schools need to emphasize 21st century skills such as analyzing, synthesizing, and creating along with understanding and…

Hanging in the entryway of Quakertown Community Senior High School in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, was the school vision: "Enter to Learn; Leave to Serve." The school vision statement contained the right words, but it did not inspire anyone. In many classrooms, teachers lectured from the front of the room, students sat in rows taking notes,…

Third-year outcomes of Re:Learning, a national collaborative effort to redesign the total school system, are presented in this report. The introduction describes the rationale underlying the preparation of the status report and describes the project. The next section describes the 1990-91 activities of Pennsylvania's nine Re:Learning development…

By describing and defending six assumptions about teacher education, the Pennsylvania Association of Liberal Arts Colleges for the Advancement of Teaching (PALACAT) defines the purposes, goals, needs, and foundations of teacher education. The role of research in teacher education and current practices in teacher education are analyzed, and a four…

This booklet, which is part of a series demonstrating the scope of employer involvement in school-to-careers, highlights the efforts of three retail employers and two "intermediary" organizations connecting workplace experiences to classroom learning for secondary education students. The introduction presents a series overview and lists…