There is growing concern among researchers and governmental officials that knowing what works in education is important, but not enough for school improvement. Sound evidence alone is not sufficient for large-scale, sustainable change, both because practitioners may consider it irrelevant to their own problems of practice or run into challenges when they try to implement. Failed attempts at replicating positive outcomes in new (or simply expanded) settings underscore the need for a different relationship between research and practice, one that takes a systemic perspective on improvement and transforms the role for research. In this article, we describe the new science of improvement and where it sits in the evolution of research on education policy implementation. We discuss the roots of the approach as well as its key features. We explain how the work differs from that of traditional research and end with illustrations of this difference from our experiences with the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools.
This article describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative process to bring to scale practices that have been shown to improve student achievement in high schools in Broward County, Florida, and Fort Worth, Texas. To do so, the Center's model of improvement relies on three core principles. First, a prototype is built to reflect the core elements of programs or practices that have been shown to be effective locally. Second, rapid-cycle testing is used to allow the prototype to be revised in ways that adapt it to a particular school context. Third, a researcher–practitioner partnership is employed that strives to both take advantage of and build local ownership and expertise. In so doing, the continuous improvement model addresses well-known challenges faced by those attempting to scale up educational innovations, challenges such as building teacher buy-in and attending to the organizational context in which innovations are to be enacted.
As social and economic problems change, so do the goals of education reformers. This content analysis of presidential debates transcripts, state of the union addresses, and education budgets from 2000 to 2015 reveals the ways in which presidents and presidential candidates have framed education goals thus far in the twenty-first century. Using Labaree’s (1997) framework of competing goals in American education, we found that democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility made their way into education discourse. Democratic equality occurred most frequently, followed by social efficiency, then social mobility. Presidents also used these goals in concert, applying symbolic language of equity to promote education policy initiatives framed as bolstering economic growth, America’s global competitiveness, and the opportunity for individuals to achieve the American Dream. Implications for federal education policy trends and frameworks for understanding the education goals of U.S. presidents in the 21st century are discussed.
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