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When School Reform Lasts

Creating the Conditions for Long-Term Change

  • Data-Based Decision Making

    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.

  • Teacher Leadership

    Education researchers and developers know a great deal about the systemic variables involved in sustaining school reform—such as assessment and alignment, leadership, curriculum.

  • Effective Partnerships Between Researchers, Teachers, and Administrators

    Some researchers approach schools with a certain level of arrogance: ‘We know what’s right, and we think we’ll make your lives better if only you’ll let us.’ It’s well intentioned but it’s very misguided. We have a different mindset at EDC; we hold firm to the notion that our collaborations need to be done in partnership and that our work is not about importing knowledge into a district.

  • Data-Based Decision Making in Action

    Like most principals facing a new school year, Carol Stack, at the Jefferson Middle School in Champaign, Illinois, had set a series of goals for herself in September of 1999. One of her top goals was to reduce the school’s suspension rate. She had a hunch that particular groups of students were being suspended in disproportionate numbers, but she didn’t have a firm handle on the scope of the problem.

  • Finding a Direction in the Data

    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.

  • Researchers and Practitioners

    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.

  • On the Frontlines of Reform

    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.

  • Teacher Leadership Programs in Pittsburgh and El Paso

    On the East Side of Pittsburgh, Vonnie Holbrook is known as “the math lady.” A teacher in Pittsburgh for 24 years, she has taught mathematics in many schools and to many children from kindergarten to eighth grade.

  • Whole-Faculty Study Groups in Everett, Washington

    Teachers from across the Everett, Washington pathway meet weekly in faculty study groups to tackle a variety of topics in teaching and learning. The study groups have taken different forms as they’ve evolved over five years, but they are all driven by student and teacher needs and interests.

  • Studying the Evolution of a 15-Year Reform Effort

    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.