Scaling Up Education Reform

What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others. Using the Te Kotahitanga Project as a model the authors branch out from the project itself to seek to uncover how an educational reform can become both extendable and sustainable. Their model can be applied to a variety of levels within education: classroom, school and system wide. It has seven elements that should be present in the reform initiative from the outset. These elements include establishing goals and a vision for reducing disparities; embedding a new pedagogy to depth in order to change the core of educational practice; developing new institutions and organisational structures to support in-class initiatives; developing leadership that is responsive, proactive and distributed; spreading the reform to include all teachers, parents, community members and external agencies; developing and using appropriate measures of performance as evidence for modifying core classroom and school practices; creating opportunities for all involved to take ownership of the reform in such a way that the original objectives of the reform are protected and sustained. This book is an essential read for anyone who is involved in the process of trying to achieve sustainable school reform that addresses the question of how mainstream schools can effectively address the learning needs of students currently not well served by education. The authors of this book are descended from a number of Maori tribes in New Zealand. They are part of the growing ethnic revitalisation movement that has seen Maori people seeking their own solutions to the ongoing social, economic, and political disparities that continue to plague Maori people in Aotearoa New Zealand. This book focuses on their attempts to work within, and change, mainstream classrooms to include all children in the benefits that education has to offer.

Drawing from the information presented at conference sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Technology in Education Consortium, leading educators, researchers, and policymakers, Scaling Up Success translate, theory into practice and provide, a hands-on resource that clearly describes different models for “scaling up” success. This important resource is filled with illustrative examples of best practices that are grounded in real-life case studies of technology-based educational innovation3⁄4from networking a failing school district in New Jersey to using computer visualization to teach scientific inquiry in Chicago. Scaling Up Success show how the lessons learned from technology-based educational innovation can be applied to other school improvement efforts.

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 2: Issues in Practice explores the challenges of implementing and assessing educational interventions in varied classroom contexts. Included are reflections on the challenges of designing studies for improving the instructional core of schools, guidelines for establishing evidence of interventions' impacts across a wide range of settings, and an assessment of national efforts to bring reform to scale in high-poverty schools. This volume also includes findings and insights from several federally funded research projects charged with bringing conceptual and analytic rigor to studies of successful scale-up. All of the chapters address the challenges of conducting scientific research in schools and provide insights for obtaining the support of teachers and school administrators. The result is a highly readable volume ideally suited for educators interested in the issues that inform intervention research, researchers concerned with designing practical studies that are methodologically sound, and policymakers engaged in evidence-based school reform.

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 2: Issues in Practice explores the challenges of implementing and assessing educational interventions in varied classroom contexts. Included are reflections on the challenges of designing studies for improving the instructional core of schools, guidelines for establishing evidence of interventions' impacts across a wide range of settings, and an assessment of national efforts to bring reform to scale in high-poverty schools. This volume also includes findings and insights from several federally funded research projects charged with bringing conceptual and analytic rigor to studies of successful scale-up. All of the chapters address the challenges of conducting scientific research in schools and provide insights for obtaining the support of teachers and school administrators. The result is a highly readable volume ideally suited for educators interested in the issues that inform intervention research, researchers concerned with designing practical studies that are methodologically sound, and policymakers engaged in evidence-based school reform.

Scale-Up in Education, Volume 1: Ideas in Principle examines the challenges of 'scaling up' from a multidisciplinary perspective. It brings together contributions from disciplines that routinely take promising innovations to scale, including medicine, business, engineering, computing, and education. Together the contributors explore appropriate methods for estimating the effects of innovations in larger, more diverse settings and provide theories and models to guide the design of innovations most likely to remain viable at large scales. Specially-commissioned commentaries also discuss the analytical requirements and theoretical possibilities of a program of educational research on scale-up built upon these foundations. This volume is ideally suited for researchers, policymakers, and graduate students charged with determining the effectiveness of educational interventions. With its insights into the conceptual and methodological prerequisites for obtaining rigorous, actionable evidence of intervention effects, the volume provides reading for program evaluation courses in schools of education and public policy.

How does one spread a successful educational reform? The essays here recount the authors?' experiences with the scale-up process. Among their lessons are the importance of building the capacity to implement and sustain the reforms, adjusting for local culture and policy, ensuring quality control, providing the necessary infrastructure, and fostering a sense of ownership. The process is iterative and complex and requires cooperation among many actors who must ensure that the results align with goals.

This open access book addresses the evasive problem of why truly effective educational innovation on a wide scale is so difficult to achieve, and what leaders may do about this. Examining the case of system-wide reform processes centering on teaching a thinking-rich curriculum, it discusses general issues pertaining to implementing deep, large-scale changes in the core of learning and instruction. The book emphasizes challenges related to professional development, assessment, achievement gaps, and the tension between knowledge and skills in 21st century curricula. It summarizes insights the author has gained from approximately 25 years of engaging with these topics both as an academic and as a practitioner who led a national change process. With a Forward by David Perkins

Health for All and Education for All have been rallying cries for a host of international development activities for more than a quarter century. Where did these global goals come from? Why have the health goals seemingly advanced so much faster than those in education? In this book, author Colette Chabbott explores the foundational role that international development organizations and the innovations they champion have played in shaping and advancing such goals. Chabbott demonstrates the importance of science and measurement in rendering some innovations more universal and compelling than others. Her analysis includes in-depth case studies of innovations developed at the grassroots and scaled up at the national and international levels by the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research and by BRAC, once a Bangladeshi now a major international NGO. These studies all suggest that greater investment in new types of education research, based in the Third World, but with strong ties to research centers of international scope in the First World, are likely the prerequisites for achieving better, cheaper, faster universal education. This important book will provoke scholars, students, and international development practitioners to think more deeply about the cultural and scientific underpinnings of education and international development. The author’s careful analyses are particularly needed as the international community defines new global goals for the post-2015 era. Book Features: Introduces the key international organizations and movements in the field of education for development. Provides a unique interpretation of the many tensions that characterize the field: government vs. non-government organizations; institutions vs. actors; and loose coupling between policies and action. Addresses the current debate about research methods in education, including quantitative indicators, randomized controlled trials, and case studies. Identifies new activities and potential directions related to the global goals phenomenon. “This is that rare book, one that is grounded in decades of policy experiences in the international development field, yet is also theoretically motivated.” —From the Foreword by Francisco O. Ramirez “Colette Chabbott brings years of development experience and exacting sociological analysis to challenge status quo understandings about the world development enterprise in this unique, ambitious, and important book.” —David P. Baker, professor of education and sociology, Penn State University, and author of The Schooled Society “In a masterful review of more than 50 years of global interventions aimed at achieving Education and Health for All, Chabbott utilizes the best in institutional theory and comparative analysis to provide a thought-provoking account of the organizational and institutional dynamics that structure, shape, and limit our ability to achieve some of the world’s most compelling goals.” —Karen Mundy, president, Comparative and International Education Society