Against the Odds
Insights from One District's Small School Reform

Larry Cuban, Gary Lichtenstein, Arthur Evenchik, Martin Tombari, and Kristen Pozzoboni

Against the Odds offers an in-depth look at the Mapleton, Colorado, school district’s transformation of two traditional high schools into seven small schools, each enrolling fewer than four hundred students.

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Strategic Priorities for School Improvement
No. 6 in the Harvard Education Letter Spotlight Series

Edited by Caroline T. Chauncey, foreword by Robert B. Schwartz

Strategic Priorities for School Improvement presents a collection of seminal articles on standards and assessment; using data to improve learning; recruiting and retaining great teachers and leaders; and turning around failing schools. Available March 2010.

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Bringing School Reform to Scale
Five Award-Winning Urban Districts

Heather Zavadsky, foreword by Thomas Payzant

Bringing School Reform to Scale looks in detail at five school districts that have been honored in recent years by The Broad Foundation, whose annual award is granted “each year to the urban school districts that demonstrate the greatest overall performance and improvement in student achievement while reducing achievement gaps among poor and minority students.”

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Leading for Equity
The Pursuit of Excellence in the Montgomery County Public Schools

Stacey M. Childress, Denis P. Doyle, and David A. Thomas, with a foreword by David Gergen

Leading for Equity tells the compelling story of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools and its transformation—in less than a decade—into a system committed to breaking the links between race and class and academic achievement.

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Instructional Rounds in Education
A Network Approach to Improving Teaching and Learning

Elizabeth A. City, Richard F. Elmore, Sarah E. Fiarman, and Lee Teitel

Instructional Rounds in Education is intended to help education leaders and practitioners develop a shared understanding of what high-quality instruction looks like and what schools and districts need to do to support it.

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How to Change 5000 Schools
A Practical and Positive Approach for Leading Change at Every Level

Ben Levin

In How to Change 5000 Schools, Ben Levin, former deputy minister of education for the province of Ontario, draws on his experience overseeing major systemwide education reforms in Canada and England to set forth a refreshingly positive, pragmatic, and optimistic approach to leading educational change at all levels.

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Learning from L.A.
Institutional Change in American Public Education

By Charles Taylor Kerchner, David J. Menefee-Libey, Laura Steen Mulfinger, and Stephanie E. Clayton

Drawing on a four-year study of the last 40 years of education reform in Los Angeles, Learning
from L.A. captures the sweeping change in American education. It puts forth a provocative argument: while school reformers and education historians have tended to focus on the success or failure of individual initiatives, they have overlooked the fact that, over the past several decades, the institution of public education itself has been transformed.

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The Transformation of Great American School Districts
How Big Cities Are Reshaping Public Education

Edited by William Lowe Boyd, Charles Taylor Kerchner, and Mark Blyth

In The Transformation of Great American School Districts, William Lowe Boyd, Charles Taylor Kerchner, and Mark Blyth argue that urban education reform can best be understood as a long process of institutional change, rather than as a series of failed projects. They examine the core assumptions that underlay the Progressive Era model of public education—apolitical governance, local control, professional hierarchy, and the logic of confidence—and show that recent developments in school governance have challenged virtually all of these assumptions.

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Resourceful Leadership
Tradeoffs and Tough Decisions on the Road to School Improvement

By Elizabeth A. City

In Resourceful Leadership, Elizabeth A. City examines decisions about the use of three key resources—time, money, and staff—and how tradeoffs among them are integrated into school leaders’ improvement strategies.

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Collateral Damage
How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools

By Sharon L. Nichols and David C. Berliner

Drawing on their extensive research, Nichols and Berliner document and categorize the ways that high-stakes testing threatens the purposes and ideals of the American education system.

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