Parents are one of the most important factors promoting children's educational success. Using parent survey data from rural primary and middle schools in one county, this study examines the implementation of the parent councils (PCs) policy in rural China, specifically, the relationships among PCs, school-based parent involvement (PI), and parent…

In the United States during March and April of 2020, more than 50 million K-12 students were impacted by school closures with many forced to engage in online teaching for continuity in their 2019-2020 school year. This disruption to K-12 public and private schools reverberated in programs of teacher education around the country. As…

Reform efforts in schools have become increasingly focused on the nature and direction of teamwork in efforts to achieve sustained and systemic districtwide capacity for innovation and needed change. The six-year study reported in this article involved development, implementation, and assessment of a unique collaborative process for districtwide…

How educational leaders initiate and sustain change is often hotly debated by those inside and outside of the system. Given the many reform initiatives of the past 30 years, and the resulting changes public educators have made lurching from initiative to initiative, one must ask if public education has truly improved. The answer to why public…

The Whole School Success Partnership (TWSSP) worked to develop practices and cultures that emphasized student success in five middle and high schools. Because this project took place in secondary schools where teachers have disciplinary specializations, the whole school approach came with unique opportunities and challenges. Here we describe how…

Specialized middle level teacher education programs are an oft-purported lever for middle level education reform. Preparing teachers to enact "new" teaching practices that challenge the status quo in field placement schools presents a formidable challenge, however. This research investigated reform-oriented collaborative inquiry (ROCI),…

In this article, James Noonan uses portraiture to examine how the administrative team and the teachers at a small, urban middle school approach school improvement. He illustrates the ways in which the pressures associated with attempting school reform in our current high-accountability environment make it difficult for school personnel to engage…

View through a power perspective, this article critically evaluates tensions involved in China's school-based curriculum development (SBCD) in middle schools: the state's concern about control, accountability, and schools' eagerness to struggle for more decision-making power. This article examines how a Chinese school and its teachers go beyond…

In this article we share our current thinking about the methodology of collaborations for change and make visible our own attempts to theorize the practice of university-school partnering. We suggest that a fruitful new direction for research may involve turning to the Global South and the Latin American idea of horizontalidad [horizontalism],…

How does teacher change get conceptualized, supported, and realized? The authors address this far-reaching question by exploring how teacher collaboration, centered on examining student learning data, can result in changes in instructional perspectives and practices. Their case study consists of a middle school mathematics teacher group working…

In 2005, the Hildago (Texas) Independent School District, in partnership with the University of Texas-Pan American, the University of Texas System, the Communities Foundation of Texas/Texas High School Project, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, promised that all of its students would earn college credits before graduating from high…

The Schools to Watch: School Transformation Network Project is a whole school reform model designed to improve the educational practices, experiences, and outcomes of low-performing middle-grades schools. Developed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded in 2010 by a U.S. Department of Education…

How can institutions of higher education, local education agencies, and departments of education partner to build capacity for 21st-Century school leadership? The model (IMPACT V) we describe utilizes a systems-wide partnership approach to cultivate shared leadership within influenced middle and high schools statewide to leverage technology as a…

Advocates for teacher education reform are calling for university faculty to become more in tune with conditions in the schools. Linda Darling-Hammond (2006), for one, says that "the enterprise of teacher education must venture out further and further from the university and engage ever more closely with schools in a mutual transformation…

This paper offers a conceptual model and rich narratives that describe the contexts in which teacher leadership emerges and the many ways that leadership is enacted. Drawing on qualitative case studies of seven Maine, USA schools, the authors found that teachers initiated their own professional learning efforts with the central goal of improving…