Having come into community colleges as an adjunct instructor 25 years ago, Linda Bowman notes that much has changed since then. Demographics are shifting, high school enrollments are declining, state budgets are tightening, and community colleges are grappling with greater competition from public and private/nonprofit, as well as from for-profit…

Nonprofit organizations providing early childhood services that support the healthy growth, development, and education of young children and their families have a unique relationship with communities. In order to have significant impact on quality of life, these programs must be sustainable and committed to meeting local needs. This article…

Evidence around adolescent learning and development is clear: School-family partnerships matter. However, traditional methods for engaging families that narrowly define who is involved and what constitutes involvement fall short of promoting optimal outcomes. Meaningful family engagement practices involve reciprocal, two-way interactions between…

The federal role in higher education has grown over the past two decades, and now a new administration has the opportunity to chart the direction of the country's colleges and universities. To help inform these decisions, the Urban Institute convened a bipartisan group of scholars and policy advisers to write a series of memos highlighting the…

This chapter discusses principles that support using data about teaching and learning and offers several strategies particularly well suited for use by institutional researchers at small colleges in helping faculty, staff, and administrators use data on student learning for improvement.

A legacy of leadership is more than a bench, as demonstrated by six Kentucky school superintendents who share a common commitment to providing a resource for continuous professional learning for district superintendents. The six leaders met at the end of their doctorate of education program at Northern Kentucky University in May 2015 to contribute…

This year's submission of consolidated state plans for implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) revealed two things: New ideas made it to the table, and many people--including those who had not before engaged in education policy conversations--contributed to the process. What is still hazy as the dust settles is whether this…

This article argues that prison abolition and education must be thought and practiced together, now more than ever. Drawing on a forum, "Without Walls: Abolition & Rethinking Education" in Oakland, CA to dialogue about strategies to challenge carceral logics in classrooms and communities, this article contextualizes the…

In the fall of 2004, an early childhood education center in the Midwest experienced a period of transition resulting from a significant turnover in administration and staff. Seeking strategies to improve and sustain a positive school culture, a newly formed Leadership Team looked to the business community for improvement strategies. The Team…

Education systems across the globe have enacted national testing regimes to monitor and report student achievement progress as an outcome of teaching performance. This paper reports on an investigation of strategies that Principals of high achieving schools use to achieve school results, based on NAPLAN reports (the National Assessment Program in…

Improving school climate takes time and commitment from a variety of people in a variety of roles. This document outlines key action steps that district leaders--including superintendents, assistant superintendents, directors of student support services, or others--can take to support school climate improvements. Key action steps are provided for…

Service transformation is an increasingly common pursuit in the higher education sector, with university strategic plans frequently featuring a "service excellence" objective and the adoption of leaner and more sustainable service models. Previous studies agree that service excellence is intentional not incidental, and systematic not…

Race and gender disparities in school discipline and associated harms have been well documented for decades. Suspension from school can reduce instructional time and impede academic progress for students who may already be lagging in their achievement. This chapter offers a research-based framework for increasing equity in school discipline. The…

What evidence supports the call for discipline reform? How might alternative strategies affect students and schools? In this article, the authors describe the critiques of exclusionary discipline and then examine the research base on which discipline policy reform rests. They also describe the alternative approaches that are gaining traction in…

The Institute of Medicine (2011) challenged nursing to ensure the nursing workforce includes a sufficient number of academic nurse leaders, nurse educators, and doctorally prepared nurses for the future healthcare needs of the people of the United States. National data reveals a fragile supply of academic nurse educators and leaders. This tenuous…