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A finales de octubre y principios de noviembre ayudé a organizar un taller para promotores de tutoría en el estado de Guanajuato, México. El propósito del taller fue involucrar a los adultos promotores de tutoría en los primeros esfuerzos por generar de manera más explícita normas y prácticas sobre el papel tanto de adultos como de gente joven en el trabajo de tutoría. Hasta ahora la tutoría se ha difundido de viva voz, en demostraciones individuales, cara a cara y en eventuales sesiones de desarrollo profesional, pero sin la intención explícita de codificar la práctica. El taller de Guanajuato se concibió expresamente para ver si una formulación más explícita de la práctica tutora ayudaría a desarrollar la nueva manera de enseñar y aprender así como acelerar su difusión.

The opportunity to design new physical environments for learning opens new opportunities to reconceive the way societies construct their understanding of learning, in a least three ways: (1) a movement away from the existing “normal science” of education toward the practice of design, intended to create learning environments based on continuous learning about learning over time ; (2) a stronger relationship between the design of learning environments and the emerging discipline of the neuroscience of learning; and (3) the deliberate creation of environments that are built to be continuously modified in light of new understandings and insights about learning.

This article by Santiago Rincón-Gallardo and Richard F. Elmore explores the question of how and under what conditions a countercultural educational practice can be brought to scale as a reform initiative. Highlighting the evolution of the Learning Community Project (LCP) in Mexico, the authors present a practice that runs counter to the traditional culture and power relations of schooling. The authors examine how the LCP succeeded in expanding to hundreds of schools and was recently adopted as part of a national strategy to transform teaching and learning in nine thousand schools across Mexico. The authors connect knowledge on bringing instructional improvement to scale with social movement theory to advance the idea of educational change as a social movement. Rincón-Gallardo and Elmore explore the implications of the work of the LCP for theory, practice, and policy—calling for an alternative approach that challenges the traditional top-down view of educational practice and policy, and instead conceptualizes the teacher-student and policy-practice pairs as dialectical and horizontal relationships of mutual influence.

Public management means quite different things when it is understood in terms of its intellectual roots in policy analysis, in terms of what managers actually do in the public sector, and in terms of the knowledge and skills required for effective performance in higher-level jobs in the public sector. As taught in the public policy schools, public management has inherited a deep skepticism about public intervention and an active decision-forcing attitude toward the practice and teaching of management. These attributes distinguish it from public administration. The public management curriculum has developed in a number of different ways, and four broad models can be discerned from existing practice: the core survey model, the elective model, the modified MBA model, and the generic model. These models differ in several ways but share a common bias toward grounding in the technical core of management skills, a strong decision-forcing emphasis, and an active view of the manager's role.

What happens when a group of public school superintendents comes together to form a community of practice for the improvement of teaching and learning? Can the members identify questions of practice and then collect, analyze, and interpret data from practice in order to improve it? Those who have taken part in the Connecticut Superintendents' Network have shown the collective will and persistence to do exactly that. (1) Established and facilitated by the Connecticut Center for School Change, a school reform organization, the Network is grounded in a theory of action concerning professional development for administrators. All participating superintendents agree with Andrew Lachman, executive director of the Center, and Jane Tedder, its education program officer, that learning is both situated and social. That is, professional adults learn not through workshops but through multiple opportunities to examine real problems with peers. (2) And capitalizing on this social nature of learning is the concept of a community of practice--a professional group "engaged in the sustained pursuit of a shared enterprise" (3) for the purpose of learning and building capacity. Members work together to "test out ideas, critique one another's work, offer alternative conceptualizations, and provide both emotional and intellectual support." (4) The Network's goals are: * to develop superintendents' knowledge and skills to lead large-scale instructional improvement; * to assist superintendents in developing distributed leadership (5) throughout their districts--that is, building a cadre of knowledgeable and skilled leaders who assume responsibility for developing their own practice around the pursuit of improvement; and * to enable superintendents to build an infrastructure that supports the work of improvement--evaluation, professional growth, networks, and opportunities for collaboration. As of its fourth year, the Network consisted of 12 superintendents who had been wrestling with establishing high quality teaching and improving student learning in classrooms throughout their districts. Six of the members had participated for three years; three, for two years; and three, for one year. Six of the superintendents were women; two were African American. Their districts were geographically and demographically diverse, serving more than 57,000 students and operating in locales ranging from postindustrial cities to affluent suburbs and less wealthy towns. In addition to the practicing superintendents, Lachman and Tedder are members of the Network, as are Richard Elmore of Harvard; David Nee, executive director of the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund; and Sharon Rallis of the University of Massachusetts. This blended network of practitioners, professors, and change agents is committed to a process in which members go into schools to observe teaching and learning directly and then support one another in solving problems that they have identified through what they have seen in practice. The group meets monthly and focuses on a problem related to student learning in a particular school identified by a member superintendent. We visit that school, conducting 20-minute observations in several classrooms and collecting data to address the problem. After the observations, we meet with the school leaders to talk about what we saw. During the following month, we meet to analyze the instructional issues raised by our observations, to consider the implications and potential solutions, and to make sense of what we have learned. Elmore helps focus the sessions and connects theory and research to practice; Rallis documents the discourse. Here we tell the story of how the Network developed and how it operates. We also discuss what we have learned, both about the process of creating the community and about the role of leadership in improving teaching and learning in schools. …

The authors share findings from a body of research on emerging accountability systems conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. THE THEORY that measuring performance and coupling it to rewards and sanctions will cause schools and the individuals who work in them to perform at higher levels underpins performance-based accountability systems. Such systems are now operating in most states and in thousands of districts, and they represent a significant change from traditional approaches to accountability. The new approaches focus primarily on schools, whereas in the past states held school districts primarily accountable. The new approaches focus on performance and other outputs, whereas in the past districts were held accountable for offering sufficient inputs and complying with regulations. Moreover, there are significant consequences, such as substantial bonuses or the threat of school closure, associated with the new approaches, whereas in the past the worst sanction, the withholding of school aid, was only rarely applied, on the ground that students would suffer the most. Researchers associated with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) have examined these emerging accountability systems in a number of ways. CPRE has conducted interviews and large-scale surveys of teachers and principals in two research sites that are using new accountability systems: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and the state of Kentucky.1 We studied the internal accountability systems in 20 public, charter, and independent schools and then followed up in three high schools in each of four states with very different accountability approaches.2 In a number of cities, we looked at school reconstitution, one of the most severe sanctions applied to failing schools.3 In a study of eight states, we examined how federal, state, and district accountability interacted and how schools were affected by the various systems.4 We also surveyed all 50 states and profiled their policies regarding assessment, performance reporting, accountability, and alignment between their Title I and general systems of accountability.5 Our research yielded a number of findings. 1. Accountability systems attract the attention of teachers and administrators. Setting student achievement goals for a school helps provide teachers with a focus for their work and increases the energy devoted to instruction. New accountability systems help channel teachers' work to the most important goals, largely those included in the performance measure. In the Kentucky and Charlotte-Mecklenburg studies, we found that teachers valued the personal satisfaction from increasing student learning, the professional recognition for doing a good job, and the receipt of a monetary bonus. Bonuses seemed to be less of an incentive for many teachers than a "thank you" for a job well done, but teachers tended to agree that a bonus was an important symbol of accountability or efficiency to the public. Negative outcomes, which were equally motivating, included increased pressure and stress to improve results, fear of being labeled as a "school in decline," and the accompanying professional embarrassment, loss of freedom through state-directed assistance or "takeovers," and expanded work hours. 2. Teachers and schools vary in their responses to accountability systems. A number of scholars have worried that focusing on test scores can severely narrow the curriculum.6 In this scenario, teachers discard favorite units and drill students exclusively on assessed content. Sometimes that drill exceeds "instruction" and crosses over into overt "test preparation." In those cases, it appears that the content is being learned only in the context of a specific test, without any broader application. However, CPRE work in 10 states suggests that, while narrowing does occur, so do other types of responses. In Kentucky, for example, the accountability system is credited with expanding the content taught to include writing and the humanities. …

This commentary on the papers starts with the view that reform policies are additive, layered and unpredictable. Given this nature of reforms, the author suggests certain lessons for policymakers and policy researchers to learn. First, that a theory of learning should underlie policymakers’ implementation decisions. Second, that the multiplicity of reforms may block genuine learning. Third, that understanding the relationship between policy and practice requires an ‘inside‐out’ perspective which takes the changing of educational practice as the central concern rather than the policy environment.

How can good educational practice move beyond pockets of excellence to reach a much greater proportion of students and educators? While many children and young adults in school districts and communities around the country have long benefited from the tremendous accomplishments of successful teachers, schools, and programs, replicating this success on a larger scale has proven to be a difficult and vexing issue. In this article, Richard Elmore addresses this problem by analyzing the role of school organization and incentive structures in thwarting large-scale adoption of innovative practices close to the "core" of educational practice. Elmore then reviews evidence from two attempts at large-scale reform in the past — the progressive movement and the National Science Foundation curriculum reform projects — to evaluate his claims that ambitious large-scale school reform efforts, under current conditions, will be ineffective and transient. He concludes with four detailed recommendations for addressing the issue of scale in improving practice in education.

We analyzed cases of restructuring experiments in three elementary schools, each with ethnically diverse populations, located in large urban school districts in different parts of the United States. Over 2 years, we gathered data on views and classroom writing practices of two teachers in each school through on-site interviews and observations. We also interviewed the principal and other support personnel. We found that these three schools did successfully restructure; changes included new student grouping patterns, new ways of allocating time for subject matter, teachers meeting together as a whole school or in teams, and access to new ideas through professional development opportunities. Through close analyses of teachers’ classroom practices, we learned that changing teachers’ practice is primarily a problem of learning, not a problem of organization. While school structures can provide opportunities for learning new practices, the structures, by themselves, do not cause the learning to occur.

In the late 1980s and mid-1990s, states began working to decrease the level of regulation of public education. Operating under the assumption that greater school autonomy is an important spur to school improvement, policymakers tried a variety of approaches to regulatory flexibility.This article examines the evolution of deregulation from limited waiver programs to charter programs and new performance-based accountability systems that include broad-scale deregulation. Early deregulation programs were so limited in design that they had very modest results, but policymakers are finding expanded efforts very difficult to achieve. Many of the same political forces and habits of practice that limited early efforts continue to pose barriers to deregulation. Underlying the barriers is a historic, continuing uncertainty about the state role and about how states should relate to districts of varying types.

This artick sets out a way of thinking about the connection between our ideas of best practice, school organization, and policy. It develops six principles of best practice in teaching and learning: (a) the object of teaching is to nurture understanding, (b) understanding occurs in the context of specific bodies of knowkledge, (c) understanding requires the active construction of knowledge by learners, (d) understanding requires the development of basic and higher order knowledge simultaneously, (e) learners differ substantially in what they bring to understanding specific bodies of knowledge, and (f) learning is a social, as well as an individual process. These ideas of best practice connect to organization and policy through the solution of four recurring problems, or regularities, of schooling: (a) how students are grouped for purposes of instruction, (b) how teachers' work is defined vis-l-vis groups of students, (c) how content is allocated to time, and (d) how students' progress is assessed. Translating principles of best practice into organization and policy requires changing traditional solutions to these problems.

Standards are the new focus of state and federal policymaking in education. The current policy debate addresses several types of standards, including performance, content, and opportunity to learn (OTL). This article focuses on opportunity-to-learn standards which define a set of conditions that schools, districts, and states must meet in order to ensure students an equal opportunity to meet expectations for their performance. States have been concerned about the issues raised by OTL standards for over a century, but they have not had much success in addressing these issues with state policy. We present some explanations for the historical inability of states to influence the equal provision of education and we offer some principles for designing new state policies that incorporate new knowledge about opportunity to learn. We conclude the article with a discussion of how states might address the underlying problem of reconciling policies more focused on performance with the problems of assuring equitable opportunities to learn.

William Clune 's case for "adequate" standards contains the following agenda: to raise and meet higher standards for student performance through combining larger compensatory expenditures with increased site-based management in disadvantaged schools. This agenda toward adequacy illuminates a general problem: the problem of productivity in educational spending. The author is skeptical that a mere infusion of money will result in proportional improvement in student performance. As long as public organizations continue to operate within the traditional model of the base budget, without developing a systematic measure of cost-benefit relations, there will be no increase in understanding how existing resources are best used to improve learning. The Clune proposal invokes the need for research focused on schools that consider how base expenditures on such factors as staffing, professional development, and curriculum can be altered to produce drastically different relationships between resources and performance.

"Toward a Knowledge Base for School Learning" (Wang, Haertel, & Walberg, 1993a) is an ambitious and provocative piece of work. It purports to capture the essential lessons from several broad domains of research and translate them into findings that are relevant for educational policy and practice. Its main finding is that so-called distal variables (demography, policy, and organization) have relatively little influence on learning, while so-called proximal variables (individual psychology, classroom instruction, and home environment) have relatively greater influence. I have neither the inclination nor the expertise to criticize the authors' methodology. In general, I find the genre of cross-cutting analyses of existing research—whether they are reviews or meta-analyses—to be enormously interesting and helpful. I find the methodological battles around this genre also to be interesting in small doses and extremely boring in large doses. I am glad that people worry about the methodological issues involved in the aggregation of research results. I understand that it is an important field of scholarly debate. But I must say frankly that I do not form my judgments about "what the research says" on the basis of these methodological disputes. So my comments will not focus on this dimension of the review. My interests lie rather in the relationship among research, policy, and educational practice (defined both as the practice of organizing and operating schools and the practice of designing curriculum and teaching it). From this perspective, I find "Toward a Knowledge Base for School Learning" to be more intriguing for what it doesn't say than for what it does say. The idea of a knowledge base is simply a convenient hook on which the authors hang their findings. Since the idea of a knowledge base is undefined, the findings hang in thin air—suspended in a peculiar world that has more to do with research and researchers than it has to do with anything related to policy or practice. The knowledge base hook, then, is a skyhook. The problems I have with this review are many of the same problems I have with other similar attempts to capture a knowledge base by analyzing existing research on schooling. I find these reviews and meta-analyses often stimulating and useful in thinking about research. I find them practically useless in thinking about policy and practice. Let me explain briefly why this might be so.

School in the Life of Adolescents The Middle Grades: Welcome to “Real School” Accountability: A Brief Digression High School: Welcome to the Attainment Structure The Way Forward Conclusions Keywords: school; middle grades; accountability; high school; attainment structures; attainment; performance; college

Rodney Ogawa and Betty Malen (1991) have presented a framework for reviewing literature from diverse sources around a common topic, arguing that such reviews should be treated as exploratory case studies and that there are well-specified standards of inquiry that apply to such studies. I find their article quite useful, in both methodological and conceptual terms, and I have few criticisms. I was, however, stimulated by their article to think about a number of questions related to the review of what they call multivocal' literatures. So rather than search for critical things to say about their article, I will try to capture a few questions that are embedded in their argument but, for whatever reason, are not treated in detail.

In this article we argue that traditional notions of state-local relations as a zero-sum game need recasting. Although some new state education reforms are exerting strong influences on the classroom, there are reasons to think that the reforms left not only considerable room for flexibility but also enhanced local activism. New conceptions of state-local relations must account for the ways in which states mobilize public and professional opinion, districts orchestrate state and local priorities around schools and classrooms, and local political entrepreneurs influence state policy. The result is often that the local effects of state policy are greater than those one would predict on the basis of state capacity, and localities often gain influence as a result of state policymaking rather than lose it.

1. Introduction 2. The conditions and characteristics of assessment and accountability: The case of four states D. Rhoten, M. Carnoy, M. Chabran and R. Elmore 3. Internal alignment and external pressure: High school responses in four state contexts E. DeBray, G. Parson and S. Avila 4. Outside the core: Accountability in tested and untested subjects L. Siskin 5. Leadership and the demands of standards-based accountability R. Lemons, T. Luschei and L. Siskin 6. Listening to talk from and about students on accountability M. Chabran 7. The impact of accountability policies in Texas high schools M. Carnoy, S. Loeb, and T. Smith 8. When an irresistable force meets an immovable object: Core lessons about high schools and accountability L. Siskin 9. Accountability and capacity R. Elmore

Monográfico con el título: 'Rendimientos de cuentas y desarrollo profesional'. Resumen basado en el de la publicación Se argumenta que las reformas educativas basadas en los estándares y en el rendimiento de cuentas fracasarán a menos que las políticas educativas americanas adopten una estrategia que asegure que el profesorado tiene los conocimientos y habilidades necesarias para ayudar a los estudiantes a alcanzar dichos estándares. Se requiere de una estrategia que invierta en el conocimiento y habilidades del profesorado que sirvan para mejorar la calidad de la práctica docente. Para que la gente en las escuelas pueda responder a las presiones externas de rendimiento de cuentas, tienen que aprender a trabajar de modo diferente. Andalucía ESP

Community School District #2, in New York City, has been engaged in a long-term process of system-wide instructional improvement, now in its eleventh year. This process involves, among other things, heavy investments in professional development for teachers and principals that are focused on introducing and supporting specific instructional practices in literacy and mathematics, coupled with system-level and school-level accountability processes designed to assure high quality instruction in all schools and classrooms.

The context for this paper is a general concern among educational reformers and students of educational reform about the role of local school districts in the improvement of teaching and learning in schools.

Thanks to Arthur Levine's report, Educating School Leaders, (1) it is no longer necessary to belabor the catastrophe that is the education, certification, and licensure of school leaders in the U.S. The cartel--the interlocking and self-perpetuating system of state agencies, cash for credit university programs, and hopelessly inadequate local hiring practices--has been exposed once again in all its gory detail, this time from within. The issue now is what should be done about it. I am dubious about universities getting better without first competing for the franchise. Rather, I think we need to rebuild a system of preparation for school leaders. Let me state a few basic design principles that could shape this work. Principle 1. Everything should be anchored in the instructional core of schooling. Traditionally, the status of educational administrators has been defined by their distance from instructional practice. This culture has resulted in a collection of people doing work that is largely irrelevant to the central tasks of schooling, while they are largely unqualified for the work that needs doing. The present accountability demands on schools cannot be addressed except through the direct management of instructional practice. Most educational administrators are unprepared to do this work, except in the most superficial ways. They are unprepared because 1) they were not selected mainly for their knowledge of instructional practice, 2) they have shielded themselves from learning about the management of instruction by deliberately focusing on other dimensions of the work, and 3) they have been rewarded for doing things other than paying attention to instructional practice. The work of running schools--managing the use of time and money, motivating and supervising people, connecting the school to its clients, meeting performance targets--has meaning only if its effects can be seen in the classroom. Learning how to do this work involves immersion in theory, in the use of evidence, and in the practice of face-to-face relations associated with the organization's work. Some of this can be learned in graduate school. Most of it can be learned only through supervised practice. The current division of labor between education schools, states, and districts does not provide settings for this learning to occur. Principle 2. Systemic problems require systemic solutions. With few exceptions, states have defaulted on their responsibility to regulate administrator preparation programs. Universities cannot resist using educational administration programs as cash cows. Districts typically have nothing resembling a human resource management strategy that would allow them to dictate requirements for prospective school leaders. It is impossible to "fix" the problem of quality in educational administration by fixing one dimension of it. The thin end of the wedge for solving these systemic problems is the improvement of the capacity of school systems to manage their human resources. Districts and schools are the places where the force of accountability is most apparent and where the incentives to improve are greatest. Districts should be allowed to run their own training and certification programs, either alone or in cooperation with other districts. Universities should be relieved of their monopoly on the preparation and certification of administrators. …

The current discussion of national goals for education creates a predicament for the federal government. Political pressure is mounting for an increased federal role in education, but its ability to play this role is limited both by its own budget and policy constraints and by the increase in education policy initiatives of state and local government over the past ten years. This predicament is not amenable to solution by resort to traditional doctrinal or functional views of federalism. It requires the formulation of a new federal strategy. Among the initiatives the federal government might take are raising public discourse about educational performance, sponsoring collaborative efforts to reduce the incoherence of current educational reforms at the high school level, and increased use of federal categorical programs as development projects for new approaches to teaching and learning. These initiatives have the advantage of being consistent with current federal budget and policy constraints, drawing upon traditionalfederal functions, and complementing state and local reform efforts.

Many graduate schools of public policy are considering how to expand their curriculum to be more inclusive of diverse elements in society. Some of the themes are familiar: how to learn from the experiences of different countries, how to bring in the perspective of women and people of different races and nationalities. Yet rarely does the debate include people with disabilities, despite the fact that there-are far more people with disabilities (as many as 43 million people, according to various estimates), with far more diverse needs, than there are other minorities. One way to teach public policy students what they need to know about the disability constituency is to include materials on disability issues in the curriculum. The point is twofold: that disability is a mainstream public policy topic that can be used to illustrate a wide array of public policy themes; and that disability issues are important enough to be studied in their own right. This article describes the types of issues that can be discussed in graduate public policy schools in order to accomplish both goals. Until now, virtually no cases have been available, but that situation has changed. Several cases are now available through a three-year grant awarded to the primary author by the U.S. Department of Education's National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The purpose of the grant is to introduce disability into mainstream public policy schools, through the development of case studies, conference workshops, and other publications. The primary author mailed a short survey to over 200 public policy/administration professors

In its relatively short history, this association has compiled an impressive record of discussion and publication on issues of curriculum and teaching in the preparation of people for professional careers in the public service.' I recall being pleasantly surprised when, as an assistant professor with barely three years' experience, I attended the first of these conferences twelve years ago and discovered that there were a number of opportunities in the program for faculty to discuss curriculum and teaching. Since then, my own ideas of what I teach and how have been deeply affected by my association with APPAM.

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was built mainly on aspirations. Experience with intergovernmental politics and management in education was not abundant before the mid-1960s, and, even if it had been, there is reason to doubt that it would have affected the aspirations of reformers. Now, with more than 15 years of experience in these matters, it is possible for federal action to reflect thoughtful assessment, since the federal role has been subject to close scrutiny for virtually the whole period. The purpose of this paper is to supply some of the analysis that might have occurred when Congress passed the Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act (ECIA) of 1981. We draw upon the major findings of research on the implementation of federal education policy to suggest some principles that might apply in the development of policy in future years. Before considering the conclusions of implementation studies, it is important to make explicit some relatively stable parameters of the federal role in education. First, the Federal Government has, and will continue to have, policy objectives different from those pursued by many states and localities. To assume otherwise is to misunderstand both the nature of the federal system and the differences in political incentives that operate at the national, state, and local levels. The Federal Government tends to pursue equity-producing policies more than states and localities, not because national politicians and bureaucrats are inherently more