Organizing and Managing Instruction in US Public School Districts: Considerations for Families, Communities, and States

This policy brief examines new ways that US public school districts are organizing and managing instruction, ways that family and community organizations can engage those efforts, and ways that states can support them in doing so. In a complex education reform landscape, understanding the different ways districts are reforming instructional organization and management can be helpful for guiding family and community organizations in strategically directing their efforts. The brief offers recommendations for states committed to sustaining new patterns of instruction while also expanding the influence of family and community organizations

Principles of Collaborative Education Research with Stakeholders: Toward Requirements for a New Research and Development Infrastructure

A group of collaborative forms of education research sits uneasily within the existing infrastructure for research and development in the United States. Members of this group hold themselves to account to ways of working with schools, families, and communities different from the research models promoted in U.S. policies and endorsed by U.S. federal agencies. Those models privilege individual investigators&rsquo; priorities for research and regularly yield products and findings with little relevance to practice. Four such models are reviewed in this paper: the Strategic Education Research Partnership, Design-Based Implementation Research, Improvement Science within Networked Improvement Communities, and Community-Based Design Research. Through a participatory process involving developers and advocates for these group members&rsquo; approaches, we identified a set of interconnected principles related to collaboration, problem solving, and research. Further, we reviewed evidence for the embodiment of these principles in from four U.S. projects belonging to these approaches by examining a total of 13 journal articles, reports, and book chapters published between 2008 and 2018. Understanding, building, and supporting enactments of these principles is a worthwhile endeavor because there is evidence that these approaches to research can promote agency and equity in education. However, supporting these principles requires criteria for judging quality, which peers can use to evaluate individual studies or sets of research; new outcomes by which to measure progress; new venues for developing and giving accounts of research; and an appreciation for the value of developing and cultivating relationships with educators, families, and communities as an integral part of research.</p

Designing and managing comprehensive school reform: The case of Success for All.

This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising integrated, school-wide programs of improvement for chronically-weak schools. Comprehensive school reform has been one of the dominant reform movements of the past 20 years. While originally performed by a small number of design teams, the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform has begun to spread among state education agencies, districts, commercial publishers, and others as they collaborate to integrate curriculum, assessment, and professional development into coherent programs of improvement for schools. The study has two goals. The first is to develop a conceptual framework characterizing the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform. The second is to use that framework to explore the work of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF). Between 1988-2000, SFAF rose to unusual prominence for its success designing and managing comprehensive school reform. Between 2001-2005, concurrent with the passage and implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, SFAF fell into decline, its continued viability in question. This study uses a conceptual framework developed around the ideas of managing interdependence and full world design to explore the work of SFAF between 1998-2005 in order to understand its rise to prominence and its subsequent decline. Drawing from the case of SFAF, I argue that we are just now beginning to understand the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform as a critical component of broader, systemic reform. I argue that our nascent understanding bears on evaluation of the progress of comprehensive school reform, the prospects of popularizing the work among institutionalized organizations, and the implications for networked charter schools as an alternative to comprehensive school reform.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationEducation historyEducational administrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125474/2/3192752.pd

Executive Leadership in School Improvement Networks: A Conceptual Framework and Agenda for Research

The purpose of this analysis is to improve understanding of executive leadership in school improvement networks: for example, networks supported by comprehensive school reform providers, charter management organizations, and education management organizations. In this analysis, we review the literature on networks and executive leadership. We draw on research in organization and management to develop a conceptual framework to structure initial, exploratory research. And we propose a research agenda aimed at comparing executive practice, knowledge, and learning a) within different types of school improvement networks (e.g., CSRs, CMOs, and EMOs) and b) between networks and institutionalized education agencies (state, regional, and local)

Democratizing Educational Innovation and Improvement: The Policy Contexts of Improvement Research in Education

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 contemporary perspective, with an emergent improvement movement in tension with an institutionalized evidence movement. By contrast, this essay provides an historical perspective through a “geological analysis” of US education reform. This analysis has the improvement movement atop macro-level policy contexts that are layers-deep, and as potentially integral to a public education enterprise that has been evolving for centuries: at the policy level, from resource-forward to practice-forward innovation and improvement; at the local level, from school systems to education systems to learning systems. This analytic approach and framework suggest the need for a new discourse about efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US, as well as possibilities for comparative and international research examining parallel developments in other countries. This essay was prepared as a contribution to The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education

Leading instructional improvement in elementary science: State science coordinators’ sense-making about the Next Generation Science Standards

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), a reform effort “for states, by states,” advances ambitious ideals for elementary science teaching, but the fate of these ideals will depend in part on the engagement of state science coordinators (SSCs). This article explores the responses of SSCs to NGSS in a purposeful sample of 18 US states. Based on analysis of 19 interviews with 22 SSCs, we develop two arguments. First, SSCs’ ideas about improving elementary science education converged around three themes: the introduction of three-dimensional science teaching and learning, the integration of engineering with science teaching, and the integration of science with ELA and mathematics. Second, SSCs’ sense-making about reforming elementary science education was situated in and shaped by (a) their knowledge of how elementary science instruction has been and continues to be de-prioritized, as well as their experiences (b) facilitating work groups in developing science standards using the Framework for K-12 Science Education, and (c) participating in professional networks.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/175128/1/tea21767.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/175128/2/tea21767_am.pd