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Background/Context: Recent trends suggest that middle-class parents may be a growing constituency in urban public schools and districts. Within the burgeoning literature on the middle class in urban public schools, most scholars have focused on parents' goals and orientations and/or the consequences of parental involvement in classroom and school settings. This article broadens the literature's scope through a focus on middle- and upper-middle-class parents' "out-of-school," neighborhood-based engagement. Examining the place-based organizing of a middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood parents' group, this article highlights the significant influence that parents' work outside classrooms and PTA meetings can have on a local school.

Background/Context: Though change is constant in organizations, determining how to successfully implement planned change has been a perennial challenge for both organizational scholars and practitioners. While the empirical knowledge base on planned change in schools and other organizations offers numerous insights, the inattention to activity, or the practice of leading and managing change, remains. Organizational change theory, and specifically organizational routines, offers a useful lens with which to examine planned change in work practice in schools. The purpose of this study is to understand the role organizational routines play in changing school work practice.

The School Construction News profile on the Noble High School project.

"As school boards address the overall challenge of social media use within schools, they should focus on the reality that the impact no longer lies only on the individual and local schools. Social networks include students and teachers all over the world and, therefore, teaching and coaching on digital literacy for teachers and students is where the focus should rest. Knowing how to build successful communities of learning and how to integrate social connectivity within a learning environment is a much more needed outcome than finding a way to control and monitor specific users and content."

(Re)Constructing Home and School: Immigrant Parents, Agency, and the (Un)Desirability of Bridging Multiple Worlds by Fabienne Doucet - 2011 Background/Context: This study examines the tactics that Haitian immigrant parents used to negotiate the boundaries around home and school, presenting the possibility that families play an active and deliberate role in creating distance between the worlds of home and school.

Student involvement in school improvement, even strategic planning, is not a high school only proposition. Younger kids can participate as well.

Subtitled "Designing for the Future of Learning."  About school design, includes Noble High School (ME) plans and photos.

Link to annual conference of NESSC called "High School Redesign in Action."

CNN profile of Weybridge elementary near Middlebury, VT.  A very small school with a tight community and commitment to education

"Yet the reaction from most "reformers," especially those with the most money, is to pretty much stay the course, to treat education as something that schools define, deliver, assess and confirm. Technology allows us to do that "better" than we have in the past, in some conversations "better" than teachers can. It allows us to "achieve" at higher levels, to compete more effectively with the world, and to stoke the push to make every child "college ready." This is not "beginner's mind"-type thinking." The Storified link is particularly worth checking out.

Form followed function at school in Minneapolis based on students doing real work, feeling welcome in learning environments.

The Long Beach, Calif., school district has adopted a training system in which classroom teachers work collaboratively to improve teaching and learning, a shift from outsourcing professional development. 

This analysis responds to a generation of criticism leveled at 1:1 laptop computer initiatives. The article presents a review of the key themes of that criticism and offers suggestions for reframing the conversation about 1:1 computing among advocates and critics. Efforts at changing, innovating, and reforming education provide the context for reframing the conversation. Within that context, we raise questions about what classrooms and schools need to look and be like in order to realize the advantages of 1:1 computing. In doing so, we present a theoretical vision for self-organizing schools in which laptop computers or other such devices are essential tools.

Interesting project looking at the varied experiences folks in the Pasadena, CA school district through 50 short films.

Making Mastery Work: A Close-Up View of Competency Education highlights the work of ten schools participating in the Proficiency-Based Pathways Project (PBP). 

Monument Mountain school Independent Project alternative to classrooms, student directed learning

Monument Mountain HS students run their own learning program.