The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a…

The 2013 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 49th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The Digest has been issued annually except for combined editions for the years 1977-78, 1983-84, and 1985-86. Its primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field of American…

Congress's role in defining and promoting equality of educational opportunity has evolved over the past 55 years since "Brown v. Board of Education." Most recently, all three branches of the federal government have focused more on equality of educational opportunity for "individual" students rather than for protected classes.…

Raising academic standards and eliminating achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students are America's prime national educational goals. Current federal and state policies, however, largely ignore the fact that the childhood poverty rate in the United States is 21%, the highest in the industrialized world, and that poverty…

This pamphlet describes the bases of the educational outcomes and indicators for students (including students with disabilities) developed by the National Center on Educational Outcomes. The importance of developing an outcomes and indicators model with a rationale, wording, and appearance that support a philosophy in which educational outcomes…

Issues related to blending or consolidating services and funding to better coordinate education for exceptional students are examined in the context of educational reform and the Goals 2000 initiative. Interviews were conducted with approximately 30 federal and state officials between May 1994 and February 1995, focusing on possible barriers in…

This guidebook is intended as a road map to the Carl D. Perkins Vocational Technical Education Act of 1998 (Perkins III) for career-technical education (CTE) practitioners and policymakers in Illinois. The following topics are among those covered: (1) framework for Perkins III (national educational reform, Illinois provisions for quality CTE,…