Charter schools--what was their original promise? They would enroll diverse groups of students. They would give teachers the room and power to innovate. They would be educational laboratories that would find new ways to reach students, and they would share those lessons with other public schools. But charter schools haven't lived up to their…

Reared in a hierarchical environment, teachers in Germany have had difficulty working with team structures despite the benefit of increased professional autonomy. The Holweide Gesamitschule in Cologne, a large comprehensive high school begun in 1975, developed a plan to diminish big-school anonymity and emphasize cooperation among children of…