Using a South Los Angeles charter school of approximately 500 students operated by a non-profit charter management organization (CMO) as the primary field site, this two-year, ethnographic dissertation project examines the implementation of a one-to-one tablet computer program in a public high school. This poster examines the variety of ways that information and communication technology (ICT) functions in everyday life within the institution -including classroom instruction, school discipline, and evaluation -through qualitative methods, primarily class observations, photographs, and interviews with teachers, students, and administrators as the program evolved over two consecutive school years. This project contributes needed empirical context to questions of technological innovation in public education, providing the first-ever multi-year study of a one-to-one tablet computer program in a California public school.

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Drawing upon his experiences as a former school superintendent and an academic, Larry Cuban examines the implications of the effective schools research for policy and practice at the district level. He focuses on the critical role played by the superintendent and by district-level policies in creating preconditions for local school improvement. Examining the issues that both separate and connect the worlds of theory and practice, Cuban describes the dilemma of school leaders who, armed with only an incomplete theory of school improvement,must make important policy decisions in the face of time pressures and political demands. He warns of some of the unintended consequences of effective schools practices that employ top-down strategies to achieve the narrow goal of raising test scores. Administrators, he argues,need a variety of policy tools and top-down and bottom-up strategies to generate significant improvement at the local level.

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There have always been students who do not meet the educational expectations of their time—students outside the mainstream mold who do not fit dominant notions of success. The differences between schools and these students can be thought of as a “mismatch” between the structure of schools and the social, cultural, or economic backgrounds of students identified as problems. In this essay we examine the history of these students who have not been able to do what educators wanted them to do. We look at how educators have labeled poor school performers in different periods and how these labels reflected both attitudes and institutional conditions. We then summarize four major historical explanations for why children fail in school—individual deficits or incompetence, families, inefficiency in schools, and cultural difference. Finally, we explore what implications this history has for students in the current standards-based reform movement, including implications for social promotion and the age-graded school. To avoid a mismatch in the standards movement, we argue that educators should focus on adapting the school better to the child, addressing social inequalities that extend beyond the classroom, and undertaking comprehensive changes that take no features of current schools for granted.