School Effectiveness
District-led School Turnaround: Aiming for Ambitious and Equitable Instruction in Shelby County’s iZone
The Shelby County iZone is a district-led effort to dramatically improve, or “turn around,” 23 of the lowest performing schools in Tennessee in the 15th largest district in the country. Despite circumstances that have proved insurmountable to many past reform efforts, iZone schools have made significant gains in performance in both math and English language arts (ELA).
Managing Networks for School Improvement: Seven Lessons from the Field
In recent decades, new networks for school improvement (NSI) have proliferated across the country. These emerging organizational structures present education leaders with an opportunity to build dynamic infrastructures to engage schools in improvements to teaching and learning. NSI are diverse. Some NSI are part of school districts, while others are contracted by school districts to design blueprints for school improvement.
Jal Mehta
Jal Mehta is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research explores the role of different forms of knowledge in tackling major social and political problems, particularly problems of human improvement. He has also written extensively on what it would take to improve American education, with a particular focus on the professionalization of teaching.
Katharine M. Conn
Katharine Conn is a senior research scientist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at Columbia University. Her current research focuses on issues of quality and access in primary and secondary education, teacher retention, alternative teacher preparation programs, school-to-work transitions in developing countries, and the use of meta-analysis in education research.
Thomas B. Corcoran
Susan Fuhrman
Dr. Susan Fuhrman is Past-President of Teachers College, Columbia University, founding Director and Chair of the Management Committee of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), and immediate Past-President of the National Academy of Education. Dr. Fuhrman’s substantial leadership track record includes her term as Dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education from 1995-2006, where she was also the school’s George and Diane Weiss Professor of Education. Dr.
