This paper pinpoints and discusses key aspects of the current approaches to school reform in the Arab world against the backdrop of what is accepted as the best practice in the international literature on effective school reform and educational change. The main goal of the paper is to highlight deeply ingrained assumptions and practices that are…

This paper documents the progress of eight middle schools, four from one school district, and four from another that were engaged in the process of implementing Professional Learning Community (PLC) concepts. The descriptive study used quantitative and qualitative information gathered in a standardized, open-ended interview with the teachers and…

As the concept of distributed leadership and its concomitant organizational structures become more prevalent in schools, studying how teacher capacity can be enhanced and can be used as a catalyst for reform is important. This article documents the nature of how the implementation of a research-validated reform influenced what teachers thought…

In a recent publication, Senge ("All systems go: the change imperative for whole system reform." Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks, 2010, x) stated "at no time in history has there been a more powerful need for a new vision of the purpose of education." Increasingly citizens, academics and practitioners are calling for radical changes to educational…

In most parts of the world today, the goal of providing all children with free and Universal Primary Education (UPE) has received broad national and international support and some educational systems have evolved from predominantly "fee-charging" towards "fee-free" status in recent times. In Ghana, for example, the endorsement of Education for All…

We report on a study of three school jurisdictions in the province of Alberta. The original premise for the research on which this report is based was to investigate the diverse ways that school districts had administered resources that were provided through a major initiative to improve learning in the province. This account is not centrally…

This paper documents the initial process by which a San Diego middle school, located in a low-income and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood and repeatedly failing to meet No Child Left Behind provisions, restructured into an academically rigorous, detracked charter school. The discussion of the political experience and working relationships…

Guided by theories of institutions, organizations, and sense-making, this manuscript examines how public, charter, and Catholic school staff in a large urban area organize for instruction and respond to educational change. To build theory about institutional processes of "organizing" from participants' perspectives, data included a survey…

In 2002 the Prime Minister of Norway initiated a central Manifesto against bullying and invited all schools to participate in anti-bullying programs. Two programs were supported by the central authorities. This paper draws on a Norwegian project where six compulsory schools participated in one of those programs. Our focus was on the implementation…