Expanding the Reach of Education Reforms. What Have We Learned About Scaling Up Educational Interventions

摘要

Over the past 20 years, we have seen both increasing demand to improve the quality of education in the United States and a new supply of improvement practices generated by external set-vice providers outside the formal school system. On the demand side, individual states and the federal government have pushed for or put in place standards, assessment systems, and incentives to improve the performance of all students and have provided funds for improvement. States, districts, schools, and teachers must now determine how to build and maintain the capability, within the newly evolving performance- based systems, to pro- vide a world-class education for each student. On the supply side, the federal government and private philanthropists have invested heavily in external providers to develop and disseminate interventions intended to improve the existing practices of teachers in classrooms and to build the needed capacity within schools and school districts to meet standards. In the past, external providers might have helped a handful of schools or teachers. As the nation has demanded systemwide improvement, however, these external providers have been challenged to scale up their reforms-implementing them more widely, more deeply, and more rapidly than in the past.