Comprehensive School Reform

The EDC-based National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform receives special recognition in a new report entitled, "Maturing Investments: Philanthropy and Middle Grades Reform," released last week by the group Grantmakers in Education.

Three years ago Egypt’s Ministry of Education set out to improve the quality of primary education for the country’s rural girls and boys. Working from the ground up, the New Schools Program (NSP), as the effort is known, encompasses all aspects of school reform—from acquiring land and building new classrooms, to training teachers and supervisors in active learning techniques, to developing hands-on instructional materials.

In 1996, Cathy McCarthy was a brand new principal at the Armory Street School in Springfield, Massachusetts, when she received word that the elementary school’s test scores were among the lowest in the city. The staff was stunned, but McCarthy saw the bad news as an opportunity to spur widespread changes in the school. She just wasn’t sure where to begin.

Much of our understanding of the relationship between technology and school reform grows out of more than 10 years of collaboration and partnership with the Union City Public Schools.

In the book The Diagnostic Teacher: Constructing New Approaches to Professional Development, EDC researchers Mildred Z. Solomon and Catherine Cobb Morocco contrast traditional models of professional learning for teachers with standard practice in other professions.

In 1999, Jeanne Century and her colleagues in EDC’s Center for Science Education set out to explore Tyack and Cuban’s provocative question in unprecedented depth. They identified elementary science programs in nine districts across the country that had been in place for a decade or more.

When Egypt’s Ministry of Education set out to increase the number of rural girls attending elementary school, it had to begin with the basics-building more classrooms. Because the schools in the Egyptian countryside have traditionally been large, overcrowded, and located a good distance from village centers, the Ministry, together with USAID and CARE/Egypt, has opted to build new, smaller schools in the rural villages.

It became clear early in the RSR study that we needed to ask ourselves, What exactly do we mean by sustainability? When a community has a program in place for 20–plus years, it isn’t the same program that started some 20 years ago, nor would we expect or want it to be the same program. How and why has it changed?

In a classic sense, what people mean by sustainability is that they are going to preserve what they have. In our work with the Carpe Vitam Foundation, we prefer to say that we want to conserve, not preserve. We have trademarked the term ‘open architecture’ to describe that process.