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Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States by showing how the actions of hundreds of thousands of rural and suburban residents who hosted children from the city perpetuated racial inequity rather than overturned it. Since 1877 and to this day, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana have brought inner-city children to rural and suburban homes for two-week summer vacations. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the forefront of his history of the Fresh Air program the voices of the children themselves through letters that they wrote, pictures that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer offers a careful social and cultural history of the Fresh Air programs, giving readers a good sense of the summer experiences for both hosts and the visiting children. By covering the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979, Shearer shows how the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air boosters largely served the interests of religiously minded white hosts and did little to offer more than a vacation for African American and Latino urban youth. In what could have been a new arena for the civil rights movement, white adults often overpowered the courageous actions of children of color. By giving white suburbanites and rural residents a safe race relations project that did not require adjustments to their investment portfolios, real estate holdings, or political affiliations, the programs perpetuated an economic order that marginalized African Americans and Latinos by suggesting that solutions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.

The issue of \"scale\" is a key challenge for school reform, yet it remains undertheorized in the literature. Definitions of scale have traditionally restricted its scope, focusing on the expanding number of schools reached by a reform. Such definitions mask the complex challenges of reaching out broadly while simultaneously cultivating the depth of change necessary to support and sustain consequential change. This article draws on a review of theoretical and empirical literature on scale, relevant research on reform implementation, and original research to synthesize and articulate a more multidimensional conceptualization. I develop a conception of scale that has four interrelated dimensions: depth, sustainability, spread, and shift in reform ownership. I then suggest implications of this conceptualization for reform strategy and research design.

Comprehensive school reform, or CSR, a currently a popular approach to school improvement, is intended to foster schoolwide change that affects all aspects of schooling (e.g., curriculum, instruction, organization, professional development, and parent involvement). Federal, state, and local legislation and funding have supported CSR implementation, and in 1997 Congress enacted the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program, which gives financial support to schools adopting such reforms. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature that documents CSR implementation, positing that the more specific, consistent, authoritative, powerful, and stable a policy is, the stronger its implementation will be. It finds that all five policy attributes contribute to implementation; in particular, specificity is related to implementation fidelity, power to immediate implementation effects, and consistency, authority, and stability to long-lasting change.

Although student engagement with the intellectual work of school is important to students' achievement and to their social and cognitive development, studies over a span of two decades have documented low levels of engagement, particularly in the classroom. Examining several theoretical perspectives that attempt to explain engagement through comprehensive frameworks, this study evaluates the effect on engagement of school reform initiatives that are consistent with the theories. The study also investigates whether patterns exist in students' engagement, whether the patterns are consistent across grade levels, and whether class subject matter (mathematics or social studies) differentially affects engagement. The sample includes 3,669 students representing 143 social studies and mathematics classrooms in a nationally selected sample of 24 restructuring elementary, middle, and high schools. Because of the nature of the nested data (students nested within classrooms nested within schools), the analysis is conducted using hierarchical linear modeling in its three-level application (HLM3L). The reform initiatives, which are consistent with the theories, eliminate personal background effects. Together with classroom subject matter, they substantially influence engagement. The results are generally consistent across grade levels.

Rural communities traditionally enjoy an intimate relationship between stakeholders and the local school system.  While preliminary research exists to suggest rural school turnaround might be more likely to occur when a strong communal connection exists (Mette, 2014), little is known about rural school turnaround efforts serving predominantly Native American students.  This article reports findings of a School Improvement Grants (SIG) funded effort to digitize curriculum and deliver instruction through the use of tablets in Yellow Pine, a school district on a Native American reservation in a rural, Upper Midwestern state.  Data were collected through interviews with school and district leaders, as well as through teacher focus groups.  Findings highlight the failure to engage a historically disenfranchised community from the beginning of the improvement process, particularly the lack of involvement of students, parents, and teachers, which in turn led to little impact on student achievement.

This volume provides an analytical framework and operational approaches needed for the implementation of results-based accountability. The volume makes a major contribution to the literature on public management and evaluation. Major subject areas covered in this book include: performance based accountability, e-government, legal and institutional framework to hold government to account; fighting corruption; external accountability and the role of supreme audit institutions on detecting fraud and corruption.

Education policy faces a familiar public policy challenge: Local implementation is difficult. In this article we develop a cognitive framework to characterize sense-making in the implementation process that is especially relevant for recent education policy initiatives, such as standards-based reforms that press for tremendous changes in classroom instruction. From a cognitive perspective, a key dimension of the implementation process is whether, and in what ways, implementing agents come to understand their practice, potentially changing their beliefs and attitudes in the process. We draw on theoretical and empirical literature to develop a cognitive perspective on implementation. We review the contribution of cognitive science frames to implementation research and identify areas where cognitive science can make additional contributions.

Many highly politicized debates about reforming teacher education are embedded within two larger national agendas: the agenda to professionalize teaching and teacher education, which is linked to the K-12 standards movement, and the movement to deregulate teacher preparation, which aims to dismantle teacher education institutions and break up the monopoly of the profession. In this article, the authors analyze how these two agendas are publicly constructed, critiqued, and debated, drawing on public documents from each side and using the language and arguments of the advocates themselves. The authors argue that, despite very different agendas, the discourse of both deregulation and professionalization revolves rhetorically around the establishment of three interrelated warrants, which legitimize certain policies and undermine others. Taken together, what Cochran-Smith and Fries label \"the evidentiary warrant,\" \"the political warrant,\" and \"the accountability warrant,\" are intended by advocates of competing agendas to add up to \"common sense\" about how to improve the quality of the nation's teachers. The authors conclude that in order to understand the politics of teacher education and the complexities of competing reform agendas, their underlying ideals, ideologies, and values must be debated along with and in relation to \"the evidence\" about teacher quality.

Words have no inherent meaning. Instead, they signify ideas or actions ascribed to them by communities, and meanings for specific words often vary across those communities. Words that carry specialized meanings in one community can be interpreted differently by another, particularly where individuals in the second community have little access to dialogues in the first, or when forces in the second community compete to assign meaning to key words. Observations of one district's mathematics curriculum writing committee suggested a disconnect of this sort occurred along the policymaker/teacher divide in one state. Where state standards used words like \"construct\" and \"concept\" to imply certain mathematics teaching methods, teachers reading these documents imputed more local, and sometimes conventional, definitions to these words. As a result, state standards lost their force. This article describes and analyzes the work of state-local policy reconciliation as it occurred in this committee, and appraises that work's implications for reform efforts that rely on language as a medium for communication.