A wide body of evidence indicates that there is a large inequality in the distribution of teachers across schools. Relatedly, recent research has revealed a number of important dimensions of teacher labor markets in the United States. We review the literature in two of these areas: the geography of teacher labor markets and the decision-making…

This article examines the first regional governance reform in public education, created in the Omaha, Nebraska metropolitan area in 2007. The legislation creating this regional reform, which is called the Learning Community, established a regional governing body, the Learning Community Coordinating Council, consisting of an elected 21-member…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change.This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

Attracting significant attention from the media and policymakers, international student assessments are serving as pressures on and challenges for individual countries. Even so, paying attention only to publicly released rankings in international student assessments may lead to superficial interpretations of the assessment results. Simply equating…

This article seeks to address how our understanding of the recovery process and resulting supports can be made more comprehensive: How can links from treatment to home to school to communities be made so that there are fewer and fewer recovery gaps for adolescents? Using the ecology of recovery model developed by White (2009) as the impetus for…

Students in schools, colleges, and universities are rapidly becoming more diverse while the teaching workforce has failed to keep pace. The underrepresentation of minority teachers on school faculties persists despite efforts by successful national teacher recruitment programs, such as the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers, to redress this…

The University of South Carolina Professional Development School (USC PDS) Network has been engaged in designing and redesigning school-university partnerships for more than 20 years with a focus on ensuring that school-based practice lies at the heart of candidate preparation. In 2012-2013, the USC PDS Network once again reexamined their program…

The Neag School of Education at the University of Connecticut is committed to the intentionality of interweaving course work and practice in its 5-year teacher preparation program, the Integrated Bachelor's and Master's program. It offers a wide range of field experiences to teacher candidates. Teacher candidates enter the program at the…

The school district is the fundamental administrative unit of schooling in the United States and the superintendent the lead official. The nature and the challenges of this position, however, vary across the landscape. Because most superintendents lead rural districts, the challenges facing those districts are the ones that typically bedevil the…

Innovations associated with gas and oil drilling technology, including new hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques, have recently led to dramatic boomtown development in many rural areas that have endured extended periods of economic decline. The Marcellus Shale play, one of the world's largest gas-bearing shale formations,…

This case study uses the work of Michel Foucault to challenge the normalization of the principal's role and to examine the complex power relations of a rural school and community in the midst of a closure/consolidation and subsequent reopening as a charter school. In so doing, we move beyond analysis of best practices and toward a more…

Since the separate-but-equal era, students attending schools with high concentrations of Black students have attempted to improve the quality of their educations through school finance litigation. Because of the negative effects of racial isolation, Black students might consider mounting school finance litigation to force states to explicitly…

Educating American Africans boys has been a mixture of political rhetoric, educational pedagogy, and historical neglect. Although American African educators have produced several models for effectively educating Black boys, most of them are dismissed as too "radical" by White researchers who have little understanding or experience in…

Where you find distressed neighborhoods, you will also find poorly performing public schools. Yet many contemporary school reform efforts ignore neighborhood-level factors that undeniably impact school performance. The purpose of this study is to use a case study approach with social institutional and urban school reform regime frameworks to…

This article explores the theory of action underlying New York University's (NYU's) Partnership Schools Program--explaining in the process what a theory of action is, and how it can be constructed for other innovations in other contexts. NYU's Partnership Program involves 23 schools, K-12, spanning several of New York City's…