NIUSI

part of the Education Reform Networks

Culture of Change and Improvement

• Impact of Two-Way Immersion on Students' Attitudes toward School and College. ERIC Digest
  This digest reports on a study that examined the impact of participation in a two-way immersion program on the language and achievement outcomes of former program participants and on their current schooling path and college plans. The study explored outcomes for three groups of students: (1) Hispanic students who began the two-way program as English language learners; (2) Hispanic students who began the program as English-only or English-dominant speakers; and (3) European American students who entered the program as monolingual speakers of English.
• Understanding Culture
  This paper was produced by the National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It is about developing a complex and dynamic understanding of culture.
• Mental Health in Urban Schools
  This paper is on mental health in urban schools. It was produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI).
• Beyond Convictions: Interrogating Culture, History, and Power in Inclusive Education
  The article presents a critical exploration into various foundational conceptions and ideologies behind the inclusive schools movement in U.S. educational policy.
• The Normal School and Some of Its Abnormalities: Community Influences on Anti-Racist Multicultural Education Developments
  The author identifies external communities of interest, among other factors, affecting secondary-level anti-racist multicultural education, analyzing schools' representations of their cultural characteristics to different communities of interest for different purposes. He concludes that schools must adopt more principled, explicit, organizational learning strategies in order to gain support for anti-racist multicultural education school improvements from their communities of interest.
• Rethinking Education in the Global Era
  The author of this article covered an exemplary school in Sweden, the Tensta Gymnasium, as a successful model of education in the global era that tries to promote lifelong learning and engagement with the world, as well as socialization for cross-cultural work. The author reviewed the general characteristics of the Tensta Gymnasium experimental high school.
• Breaking Racial Stereotypes by Reconstructing Multicultural Education
  Racial stereotypes and discrimination have destroyed many bright futures by limiting the possibilities of people of color in America. The author describes two initiatives that can be implemented in schools in order to help destroy negative images of race and reconstruct a more healthy foundation to build on: multiculturalism across the curriculum and multicultural awareness inservices for teachers.
• On Inclusion and the Other Kids:Here's What Research Shows so Far About Inclusion's Effect on Nondisabled Students
  This OnPoint was developed by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It summarizes the reserach literature on inclusion's effect on nondisabled students.
• Elementary and Middle Schools Technical Assistance Center: An Approach to Support the Effective Implementation of Scientifically Based Practices in Special Education
  The researchers at the Elementary and Middle Schools Technical Assistance Center (EMSTAC) tested an insider-outsider approach to assist local school districts in effectively identifying and implementing scientifically based practices. Methods used to measure EMSTAC's effectiveness in supporting successful practice adoption are presented.
• Examining the Relationship among Opportunity, Inclusion, and Choice
  The authors describe the multicultural language practices used at Western Hills Elementary School in Denver, Colorado. They discuss social and cultural dimensions of learning and their relationships to second language acquisition.
• A Faceless Bureaucrat Ponders Special Education, Disability, and White Privilege
  The author of this article critiques categorical approaches to special education, overrepresentation of minority children in special education, inclusion and exclusion, and white privilege. Also, she describes the potential of multicultural education, transformation, and participatory leadership approaches to address the issues raised in the critique.
• Conducting Focus Groups to Develop a Comprehensive School Portrait
  This paper is one of the brief practitioner oriented pamphlets called On Points produced by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). This On Point is for all teachers who want to explore issues around conducting focus groups to develop a comprehensive school portrait.
• A web of support: The role of districts in urban middle-grades reform.
  This report prepared by the Academy for Educational Development (AED) presents information and strategies for implementing reform efforts in middle-grades schools. In particular, it draws on the perspectives and experiences of 50 district administrators from 35 urban districts who participated in the Urban Middle-Grades Reform Network.
• Determining Policy support for Inclusive schools
  This document was designed to help teams of policy-makers, practitioners, and advocates implement inclusive practices. There are six sections in this guide, each representing a policy area.
• Urban school reform from a student- of-color perspective
  The author of this article looks at one school community's efforts to fundamentally alter the structure, curriculum and instructional practices in ways that would help to provide greater educational opportunities for all students.
• The Role of Critical Multicultural Education and Feminist Critical Thought in Teacher Education: Putting Theory Into Practice
  The authors identified current problems in teacher education by recognizing larger social dilemmas and the need for change. The authors discussed the need to acknowledge one's perpetuation of social problems and examined how to transform schooling through a major shift in critical reflection on social issues.
• Looking at the Evidence More Carefully: Achieving the Ideal?
  Schools could make a major contribution toward a racist-free society by stressing more emphatically the need for teachers and students to critically examine all the evidence before making judgments or taking action. By instilling into children a basic set of rules enabling them to make appropriate judgments, teachers can help people rationally defend their beliefs, opinions, and behaviors.
• Toward a framework for preparing leaders for social justice
  Following the idea that putting social justice in educational practices, the authors proposed one possible framework for conceptualizing the preparation of leaders for social justice. To this end, three central questions guided this conceptualization: "What are the common themes in the literature and research on preparing leaders for social justice?"; "How can this framework serve as a guide for developing a course, set of courses, or an entire program toward preparing leaders to lead socially just schools?"; and "How can this literature and conceptualization inform future scholarship in administrator preparation?" This work included a review of 72 pieces of literature.
• The Reflective Principal
  This booklet was developed by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI)as part of the activities of the Principal's Project, a federally funded grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education Programs.
• A story of change: Growing leadership for learning
  The author of this article examined the process of change in 22 schools which participated in a three year study of leadership spanning seven countries. Quantitative and qualitative measures were used to establish a baseline in each of the schools, providing a basis for discussion at follow up workshops, and offering agendas for schools to work on and to refer to in face-to-face and virtual networking.
• Collaborative reform and other improbable dreams: The challenges of professional development schools
  This book discusses a 10-year process of teacher education reform at a major public research university (The Ohio State University) and the challenges that ensued. The thirteen Professional Development Schools (PDSs) described are diverse yet they share a focus on school/university collaboration, reform in teacher education, professional development, and inquiry.
• On the Nexus of Race, Disability, and Overrepresentation: What Do We Know? Where Do We Go?
  This OnPoint was developed by the National Institute for Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It is about minority overrepresentation in U.S.
• Poverty, class, and disability: A historical, social and political perspective
  This article presents a historical, social and political perspective on poverty, class and disability particularly regarding benefits to students who have been classified as having "special needs," and the necessity of inclusion and special education reform.
• Leading out from low-performing schools: The urban principal experience
  Researchers in the field of education have researched the educational leadership in urban schools primarily by focusing on the school context, and not the leadership required to facilitate school improvement. Through a collaborative inquiry process, six principals and two researchers spent almost two years exploring in depth the nature of the urban leadership in turning around low-performing schools.
• From Rhetoric to Reality: Opportunity-to-Learn Standards and the Integrity of American Public School Reform
  Focusing on national policy and practice, this paper suggests key recommendations for consideration in the context of standards-based reform. The reform produced teachers who are multiculturally literate; re-assess ability grouping and tracking practices, reduced K-3 class size and elementary and secondary school size, and expanded and improve federal compensatory education programs; and incorporate school reform into broader social reform.
• Crafting Multicultural Science Education with Preservice Teachers through Service-learning
  The author explores community service-learning as one way to address the multicultural dimensions of preservice science education. She provides background information on multicultural science education and the use of service learning.
• Investigating leadership practice: Exploring the entailments of taking a distributed perspective
  This paper is about distributed perspectives on educational leadership. It applies to all educational leaders.
• Teacher Education and Knowledge in "The Knowledge Society": The Need for Social Moorings in Our Multicultural Schools
  The authors considered the missing elements of race, class, gender, and power relations in the knowledge base for teacher education, suggesting a knowledge base for the missing ideas, especially in the area of questioning the effects of social, cultural, and historical movements and power relationships. The concept of social mooring is applied to make connections between academic discussions and social movements.
• Data mining with a mission - Data-Driven Decision Making Is the Buzz Phrase of Choice for the New Decade. but Once We've Got the Information, How Do We Use It to Yield Results?
  The author discussed issues concerning data-driven decision making in the school setting. A key aspect of data-driven decision making involves looking at information over an extended period of time.
• School-Based Management: Reconceptualizing to Improve Learning Outcomes
  The authors examined educational decentralization efforts in both developed and developing countries, guided by two questions: (1) under what conditions does school-based management (SBM) produce best results and (2) what are the roles and relationships of the school/community and of the region/center. The authors summarized, from recent literature, reasons for the usual failure of SBM and identify the conditions under which SBM works, noting school/community relations and external infrastructure as important factors.
• Technology as a Tool in Multicultural Teaching
  The authors explore various applications of multimedia, interactive, Internet, and Web-based electronic tools to multicultural teaching, asserting that while sound classroom pedagogy and constructive dialogue are still very important in education, technology integration is a useful addition. They suggest that these new media broaden the form of materials available to students in multicultural contexts.
• Pedagogy, Politics, and Schools: Films about Social Justice in Education
  The authors review six films about issues related to multicultural and social justice education in the United States: "It's Elementary: Talking about Gay Issues in School"; "Starting Small: Teaching Children Tolerance"; "In Whole Honor?"; "Children Talk about AIDS"; "Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary"; and "'Good Morning Miss Toliver.'" .
• Instructional leadership challenges: The case of using student achievement information for instructional improvement
  This article is about the instructional leadership. It applies to educational leaders.
• Reporting on Teacher Quality:The Politics of Politics
  Responds to the Secretary of Education's 2002 report, "Meeting the Highly Qualified Teachers Challenge," which asserts that states must transform certification requirements because while states' academic standards for teachers are low, barriers that keep out qualified people who have not completed collegiate teacher preparation are high. This editorial suggests that four critiques are essential in responding to the report: empirical, conceptual, social justice, and political.
• How Can Comprehensive School Reform Models Be Successfully Implemented
  The author reported a study that focused on the implementation of comprehensive school reform (CSR). Variation in CSR implementation, importance of the implementation, and analysis of CSR implementation were discussed by using the policy attributes theory.
• The Role of Leadership in the Promotion of Knowledge Management in Schools
  The author of this paper drew on school systems and successful business to identify what knowledge sharing looks like in successful organizations. He suggested that knowledge building is a critical capacity for all organizations, and especially for schools and school systems.
• Secondary Schools in a New Millennium: Demographic Certainties, Social Realities
  The author of this report examined the demographic trends, social realities, and complexities that can potentially transform American secondary schools. They described the nature of diversity in the world and nation and between and within states and school districts.
• Literacy, Power and Social Justice
  This book examines how in a multicultural, multilingual society, schools must involve parents and community members in literacy teaching and learning. By building on existing literacy, schools can become catalysts in empowering children, families, and teachers.
• Anti-Bias Teaching To Address Cultural Diversity
  Multiculturalism must be integrated into classrooms and the curriculum, and it must be all-encompassing, taught through formal lessons and modeled and demonstrated at all times. The author describes how teachers can create an anti-bias curriculum and promote a multicultural or anti-bias classroom.
• Developing Multicultural Counseling Competencies through Experiential Learning
  The authors focused on experiential learning as a teaching and learning methodology to increase students' multicultural counseling competencies. They outlined ethical and practical suggestions for using experiential learning in multicultural counseling curriculum.
• Living (and Teaching) in an Unjust World: New Perspectives on Multicultural Education
  This collection of essays is a response to educators who limit multicultural education to "culture of the quarter" or "country of the week." The authors of these essays examined the issues of multicultural education deeply, exploring the just and unjust issues of schooling, the need to move beyond teaching about culture to facilitating self discovery, and the way classrooms mirror larger society.
• Preparing Teachers for Diversity: Lessons Learned from the U.S. and South Africa
  The author analyzed U.S. and South African teachers' discourses, investigating differences in development of commitment among teachers who engaged in talk-related activities within teacher education versus those who engaged in talk-related activities plus theory-enacting activities within diverse classrooms.
• When Should Bilingual Students Be in Special Education?
  The authors focus on the challenges in special education for culturally and linguistically diverse students in the U.S. They discuss overrepresentation of diverse students in special education, exclusionary clause included in the definition of learning disabilities under the Individual With Disabilities Education Act and factors that affect the test performance of diverse students.
• The Three Stories of Education Reform
  Michael Fullan discussed large-scale education reform and illustrates the reform through three stories. He differenced that professional learning communities for educators makes in how well students do in school.
• Hispanic Education in the United States: Raices y Alas. Critical Issues of Contemporary American Education
  This book portrays what works in creating better educational opportunities and effective school reform for Hispanic Americans, offering a reflection on the bicultural experience of minority groups in U.S. schools and showing how and why educational reforms must seek to build upon rather than downplay the native culture and language of minority students.
• Integrating Lifelong Learning Perspectives
  This report was developed by United Nations Educational,Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It includes forthy-three papers on the topic of promoting lifelong learning.
• Principals of Inclusive schools
  This paper was developed by the National Institute of Urban School Improvement (NIUSI). It is about the roles of school leaders in inclusive schools.
• At the end of the day: Lessons learned in inclusive classrooms
  This book encompasses eight case studies featuring diverse children with varying disabilities - from preschool to high school - that show how including them in the classroom affects families, teachers, and other students. These case studies, combined with the latest research, enable educators to evaluate different methods for inclusion.
• Improving Pupil Attendance: Inclusive and Sensitive Approaches
  The author described a British secondary school's efforts to improve student attendance by promoting social inclusion. The project involved a first day absence monitor, school counselor, Education Welfare Officer, and specialist teacher.
• Creating schools as learning communities: Obstacles and process
  This article is about the concept of learning organization/community and applies to all teachers and educational leaders. The authors attempted to clarify the concept of learning organization/community in order to identify the barriers that are perceived to obstruct the creation of learning communities out of traditional schools; to identify how principals go about the task of converting their schools; and the special characteristics of leadership required to transform schools successfully.
• Multicultural Education and Technology: Perfect Pair or Odd Couple? ERIC Digest
  This digest examines how technology can support multicultural education. Multicultural education represents an approach to education and the teaching-learning process that is grounded in the democratic ideals of justice and equality.
• Inclusion as social justice: Critical notes on discourses, assumptions, and the road ahead
  This article applies to all teachers both in general education and special education who are to teach students with disabilities alongside their peers without disabilities. This is generally called inclusion.
• Teachers as Leaders: a critical agenda for the new millennium
  Education systems around the world are implementing school-based management organisational reforms resulting in new and enhanced roles for teachers. As a result, traditional notions of what skills, knowledge, competencies and attitudes teachers need to carry out their roles and responsibilities are changing.
• Diversity Education in Administrator Training: Preparation for the 21st Century
  This article investigates the impact and necessity of multicultural training in administrator-preparation programs, and the extent to which administrators can ensure that teachers honor diversity. The importance of the quality of the administrator's training is emphasized.
• Understanding Factors that Contribute to Disproportionality
  The authors presented a study involving 12 elementary schools investigated hiring and placement decisions of school district-level personnel and principals. The authors found that inequities in the quality of leadership and instruction in the inner-city schools exacerbate efforts to reduce disproportionate placements of culturally and linguistically diverse children into special education.
• The return of large-scale reform
  The author reviewed three "types" of large-scale reforms and the emerging lessons being learned. Whole school district reform involving all schools in a district; whole school reform in which hundreds of schools attempt to implement particular models of change, and; state or national initiatives in which all or most of the schools in the state were involved.
• Teachers of Gifted Students: Suggested Multicultural Characteristics and Competencies
  The authors of this article discussed desired characteristics and competencies in teachers of gifted students who are culturally, ethnically, or linguistically diverse. These include: culturally relevant pedagogy, equity pedagogy, a holistic teaching philosophy, a communal philosophy, respect for students' primary language, culturally congruent instructional practices, culturally sensitive assessment, student-family-teacher relationships, and teacher diversity.
• Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching
  The author discusses improving the school success of ethnically diverse students through culturally responsive teaching and for preparing teachers in pre-service education programs with the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to do this.
• Homophobia and the Demise of Multicultural Community: Strategies for Change in the Community College
  The author looked at teaching strategies for incorporating texts by sexual minorities into writing and literature classrooms, and for handling blatantly homophobic comments. He argued that such comments work to undercut the idea of a writing community.
• Inclusive Schooling in a Plural Society: Removing the Margins
  The author proposes a multi-centric model of education that actively works to de-center dominant Eurocentric knowledge and incorporate other worldviews throughout all aspects of teaching and learning. The model has four primary learning objectives: integrating multiple centers of knowledge, affecting social and educational change, recognizing and respecting difference, and teaching youth and community empowerment.
• "There Is No Way To Prepare for This:" Teaching in First Nations Schools in Northern Ontario--Issues and Concerns
  The author of this qualitative study examined the experiences of 10 mostly inexperienced, female teachers working in two geographically isolated Native communities in northern Ontario. Findings focus on teachers' uncertainties about appropriate pedagogical goals, the relationship of teachers to First Nations communities, living in the North, cross-cultural and multicultural teaching, and teaching English as a second language.
• Self-knowledge, capacity and sensitivity: Prerequisites to authentic leadership by school principals.
  This article is about authentic leadership. It applies to all educational leaders interested in developing authentic leadership capacities within themselves and amongst others.
• Creating a school environment for the effective management of cultural diversity
  The authors of this article examined the factors that affect the creation of a school environment for the effective management of cultural diversity as legislated for in the directive principles of the South African Schools Act of 1996 and the Schools Education Act of 1995. These two Acts determined that every person shall have the right to basic education and to equal access to schools and centers of learning.
• Learning and Living Difference That Makes a Difference: Postmodern Theory and Multicultural Education
  Multiculturalism that both transforms and informs is important. The author recommends applying postmodern theory to transformative understanding of multiculturalism.
• Inclusion, diversity and leadership
  Drawing on research from a longitudinal case study of a large urban secondary school, this article examines senior leadership of and in a school struggling to be inclusive. The analysis focuses on the effect of senior leadership on: the ways in which inclusion is conceptualized and practised in this school, in particular by teachers; student intake profiles and diversity; teacher motivation and educational outcomes.
• Already Reading Texts and Contexts: Multicultural Literature in a Predominantly White Rural Community
  The authors examined how the inclusion of multicultural texts played out in one predominantly white rural community, focusing on repercussions of a key event that set off conflict in the community and describing how various interpretations of this event haped teachers' and community members' beliefs about the selection, interpretation, and teaching of multicultural literature.
• Professional development for urban principals in underperforming schools
  Principals in America's lowest performing urban schools face many challenges, including public scrutiny as a consequence of being identified as such by state and federal legislation. These special circumstances have implications for the professional development of the leaders of these schools.
• From individual acquisition to cultural-historical practices in multicultural teacher education
  This article applies to all teacher educators, teachers, and pre-service teachers. Due to poor school performance among minority students in U.S.
• Making science accessible to all: results of a design experiment in inclusive classrooms
  The authors of this article presented their findings from a study of four elementary classrooms. They indicated that with advanced instructional strategies to support special needs students, all students demonstrated significant learning gains, and that special needs and low-achieving students in three of four classes showed changes in understanding comparable to those of normally achieving students.
• Social Inclusion: Would Dickens Approve?
  The author discusses exclusion of ethnic minority students from school in Britain as it reflects the operation of complex differential expectations and assumptions. Data from several studies show that exclusions have been racialized and that black boys are often excluded or disciplined for showing culturally specific behaviors.
• Outcomes for students with and without learning disabilities in inclusive classrooms
  The authors focus on intensive staff development for general and special educators that taught the educators how to implement instructional strategies with students who had a wide range of abilities in an inclusive classroom. Their study that examined social outcomes of 59 elementary school students with learning disabilities, 72 low- to average-achieving students, and 54 high-achieving students, found that students in the consultation/collaborative-teaching setting demonstrated more positive outcomes than students in the co-teaching setting on friendship quality and peer acceptance.
• Tools of Exclusion: Race, Disability, and (Re)segregated Education
  The authors explore the dynamic interplay between racism discrimination against someone based on perceived 'ability"in the resistance to school desegregation and inclusion of students with disabilities in general education. In attending to the workings of power that connect these two histories, the authors show how racialized notions of ability functioned to uphold segregated schooling and justify the use of special education as a tool of racial resegregation.
• Inclusive education for the 21st century: A new introduction to special education
  The authors of this book challenged pre-service special education and regular education teachers to develop the knowledge and skills to produce and support "inclusive school communities." Pre-service teachers are introduced to the inclusive community philosophy-include everyone, regardless of intelligence, disability, ethnicity-in supportive, mainstream classrooms and schools in which all student needs are met and all students are offered the same opportunities for success. To meet this growing challenge, the teacher-to-be must embody concepts of inclusion, community, collaboration, democracy, and diversity.
• The Change Leader
  In this article, Michael Fullan, a leading scholar in the field of educational reform, argued that concept of principal as instructional leader is too limited to sustain school improvement. He commented that only principals who are equipped to handle a complex, rapidly changing environment can implement the reforms that lead to sustained improvement in student achievement.
• (Dis)Integrating Multiculturalism with Technology
  The author examines whether K-12 teachers are prepared to use technology in innovative and effective ways to authentically present multicultural education. He discusses the potential inability of teachers to provide an authentic version of multicultural education in the presence of technology as both an individual decision and as the result of generally underconceptualized teacher preparation in the instruction of multicultural education.
• Expansive Learning at Work: toward an activity theoretical reconceptualization
  This articles discussed the implications of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) for our understanding of the increasingly important horizontal dimension of learning. CHAT has evolved through three generations of research.
• Field-based Teacher Education for Greater Cultural Sensitivity
  Southeast Missouri State University revised its teacher education program to include field-based experiences in each of its four blocks of courses. Student teachers are placed in rural and urban schools with pupils from various socioeconomic, cultural, racial, and disability groups.
• The Multicultural Science Framework: Research on Innovative Two-Way Immersion Science Classrooms
  The author of this article reviewed the different approaches to multicultural science teaching that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on the Spanish-English two-way immersion classroom, which meets the needs of Spanish speakers learning English and introduces students to the idea of collaboration across languages and cultures. Two urban two-way immersion classrooms in Texas and New York are described by the author for exemplary practices.
• Backward design for forward action
  Using data to improve student achievement is a crucial issue and indicates an everyday challenge for all teachers and school leaders. In this the article, the authors explicitly demonstrate how school improvement initiatives can be integrated at the school and district levels.
• Color-blind and color-conscious leadership: A case study of desegregated suburban schools in the USA
  This article is about cultural and linguistic diversity in educational leadership. Leadership and diversity are invariably connected, as U.S.