Books by CPRE Researchers

Books must be ordered from the publishing company indicated with each selection.

2007

(In Press) The State of Education Policy Research
by David K. Cohen, Susan H. Fuhrman, and Fritz Mosher

In this new book, senior CPRE researchers Susan H. Fuhrman and David K. Cohen, with CPRE consultant Fritz Mosher, and other contributors, offer a comprehensive perspective on the last half century of education policy, research on policy, and the relations between research and policy. The volume, soon-to-be published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. (LEA), also considers ways in which the knowledge needed to reach ambitious contemporary education goals might be developed.

The State of Education Policy Research can be preordered at a 20% discount at the LEA booth (#405-413) during the AERA annual conference in Chicago.

2006

The Case for District-Based Reform (NEW RELEASE)
Jonathan A. Supovitz
Available from: Harvard Education Press, 8 Story Street, 1st Floor, Cambridge, MA (October, 2006)

This volume by CPRE Senior Researcher Jonathan A. Supovitz was recently published by Harvard Education Press. It examines comprehensive school reform in one representative district. In 1999, under the superintendency of retired Air Force major John Fryer, the Duval County (Fla.) school system set out to improve every school in the district. Over the next five years, the district achieved stunning results that have drawn nationwide attention.

Supovitz uses the unfolding story of Duval County to develop a sophisticated and thoughtful analysis of the role of the school district in enacting large-scale reform. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and extensive first-hand observation, Supovitz chalks a vivid portrait. His book weaves together seamlessly the account of leadership and change in one district with an investigation of the larger questions associated with this particular approach to school reform.

2005

The Public Schools
Susan Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson (Eds.)
Available from: Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 (2005)

From curriculum standards and testing to school choice and civic learning, issues in American education are some of the most debated in the United States. The Public Schools, a collection of essays by some of the nation's leading education scholars and professionals, is designed to inform the debate and stimulate change.

In association with the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands and the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, The Public Schools is the first in a series of books commissioned to enhance public understanding of the nature and function of democratic institutions.

Each essay in The Public Schools addresses essential questions for policymakers, educators, and anyone committed to public education. What role should public education play in a democracy? How has that role changed through American history? Have the schools lost sight of their responsibility to teach civics and citizenship? How are current debates about education shaping the future of this democratic institution?

2004

Redesigning Accountability Systems for Education
Susan H. Fuhrman and Richard F. Elmore, editors
Available from: Teachers College Press, PO Box 20, Williston, VT 05495-0200. (2004)

Now more than ever, policymakers face a number of difficult political, educational, and technical questions in the design and implementation of new accountability approaches. This book gathers the emerging knowledge and lessons learned by leading scholars in the field to provide an invaluable resource for policymakers, educators, and anyone interested in the pressing issue of accountability and public schools.

School Reform From the Inside Out: Policy, Practice, and Performance
Richard F. Elmore
Available from: Harvard Education Press 8 Story Street, 1st Floor, Cambridge, MA 02138 (2004)

In School Reform From the Inside Out, Richard Elmore tackles issues ranging from teacher development to testing to "failing" schools. The essays in this book embody a particular stance that is expressed by the thesis that "the problems of the system are the problems of the smallest unit." As Elmore aptly notes, successful school reform begins "from the inside out" with teachers, administrators, and school staff, not with external mandates or standards. This collection of essays is intended for any school leader, education reformer, policymaker, or citizen interested in the forces that promote real school change.

2003

All Else Equal: Are Public and Private Schools Different?
Luis Benveniste, Martin Carnoy, and Richard Rothstein
Available from: RoutledgeFalmer, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 (2003)

Private schools always provide a better education than public schools. Or do they? With the Supreme Court reviewing Cleveland's voucher program, the debate has been pushed to the forefront of American politics. However, most of these debaters simply assume that private schools are better than public schools. Rothstein, Carnoy, and Benveniste have parsed the many studies on this subject, and concluded that there's very little difference between public schools and their nearby private counterparts. All Else Equal challenges us to reconsider vital policy decisions and rethink the issues facing our current educational system.

The New Accountability: High Schools and High-stakes Testing
Martin Carnoy, Richard Elmore, and Leslie Santee Siskin
Available from: RoutledgeFalmer, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 (2003)

The New Accountability explores the current wave of school accountability reforms, wherein schools that perform poorly on standardized tests may face reorganization, a new principal, or even financial sanction. This important new study looks at the data behind "high-stakes testing" in Texas, New York, Kentucky, and Vermont, and comes to some very important conclusions. It shifts the focus of the debate from how well high school graduates are prepared for college or work to the larger question of how many students are graduating in the first place, and how these stringent testing measures may affect those students on the edge.

Taking Account of Charter Schools: What's Happened and What's Next?
Katrina E. Bulkley and Priscilla Wohlstetter, with foreward by Paul T. Hill Available from: Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 (2003)

This book features contributions from today's top scholars in the field of charter school research. This comprehensive volume offers a set of new emprical studies that explore the impact these schools have on teachers, students, educational practices, and school governance.

Who Controls Teachers' Work? Power and Accountability in America's Schools
Richard M. Ingersoll
Available from: Harvard University Press, 79 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 (January 2003)

Who makes the crucial decisions concerning what and how students are taught in school? How much say do teachers have over their work and how much should they have? Are schools decentralized places where teachers work with little supervision or accountability, as some claim? Or are schools overly centralized places with too much top-down bureaucracy restricting teachers, as others argue? And what difference does it make, if any, for how well schools function? Drawing on data from international and national surveys as well as wide-ranging interviews with teachers and administrators, this book confronts one of the most important, controversial, and misunderstood issues in education --- who controls the work of teachers? Most research and policy, this book shows, overlook a fundamental fact: schools are not simply organizations engineered to deliver academic instruction to students, as measured by test scores; teachers also play a large part in the social and behavioral development of children. Researchers and reformers misunderstand how much and what kinds of control and accountability currently exist in schools, and how much and what kinds should exist. As a result, many educational reforms -- charter schools, school choice, educational accountability, school restructuring, teacher professionalization, and school-based management -- too often begin with inaccurate premises about how schools work and so are bound, not only to fail, but to exacerbate the problems they propose to solve.

2002

Standards Reform in High-poverty Schools: Managing Conflict and Building Capacity
Carol Barnes
Available from: Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 (September 2002)

This book illustrates what actually happens when school reform encounters a high-poverty, linguistically diverse school. Based on two years of observation and interviews, the book shows how professional identities, social resources, and conflicting purposes shaped one elementary school’s capacity to understand and implement state-mandated reforms. Like many American schools, Mission Elementary embodies the disputes as well as the challenges that are central concerns of today’s educational reforms. The book helps readers to understand the processes involved in improving the performances of teachers, school leaders, and students in high-poverty settings -- especially the pedagogical aspects of policy and program implementation and the complex issues of social and individual change. It brings together the ideas of conflict and capacity by exploring what the staff brought to the task of school renewal in terms of understanding, experience, and belief; what they were able to learn; what conventional resources they had; and how they used those resources. Finally, this book sheds much-needed light on the implementation of one of the most ambitious education reform attempts in recent history: the standards reforms in California.

2001

From the Capitol to the Classroom: Standards-based Reform in the States
Susan H. Fuhrman, editor
Available from: University of Chicago Press, National Society for the Study of Education, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. Phone: (773) 702-7700 (2001)

The National Society for the Study of Education's second centennial volume focuses on standards-based reform in the United States: its overall theory, means of implementation and assessing impact, the ways in which schools and teachers have responded to policy changes, and the progress and future direction of reforms.

Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works
David K. Cohen and Heather C. Hill
Available from: Yale University Press, Direct Mail Department, P.O. Box 209040, New Haven, CT 06520-9040 (2001)

Education reformers and policymakers argue that improved students’ learning requires stronger academic standards, stiffer state tests, and accountability for students’ scores. Yet these efforts seem not to be succeeding in many states. The authors of this important book argue that effective state reform depends on conditions which most reforms ignore: coherence in practice as well as policy and opportunities for professional learning. The book draws on a decade’s detailed study of California’s ambitious and controversial program to improve mathematics teaching and learning. Researchers David Cohen and Heather Hill report that state policy influenced teaching and learning when there was consistency among the tests and other policy instruments; when there was consistency among the curricula and other instruments of classroom practice; and when teachers had substantial opportunities to learn the practices proposed by the policy. These conditions were met for a minority of elementary school teachers in California. When the conditions were met for teachers, students had higher scores on state math tests. The book also shows that, for most teachers, the reform ended with consistency in state policy. They did not have access to consistent instruments of classroom practice, nor did they have opportunities to learn the new practices which state policymakers proposed. In these cases, neither teachers nor their students benefited from the state reform. This book offers insights into the ways policy and practice can be linked in successful educational reform and shows why such linkage has been difficult to achieve. It offers useful advice for practitioners and policymakers seeking to improve education, and to analysts seeking to understand it.

Paying Teachers for What They Know and Do: New and Smarter Compensation Strategies to Improve Schools, Second Edition
Allan R. Odden and Carolyn Kelley
Available from: Corwin Press, Phone: (800) 818-7243, Email order@corwinpress.com (2001)

This second edition describes various pay and compensation initiatives currently in use across the United States, including signing bonuses, upgrades in teacher pensions, higher salaries to those who are willing to work in more challenging schools, and other approaches. It explores the different types of compensation plans used in the private sector as well as systems based on the continued acquisition of skills, knowledge, and experience. The authors describe how these plans can be applied successfully in districts of any size. Topics include: the current status of teacher compensation, approaches to compensating teachers, the relationship between pay and motivation, knowledge- and skills-based pay, group-based performance awards, gain-sharing programs, and ways to design and implement alternative teacher compensation.

2000

Reallocating Resources: How to Boost Student Achievement Without Asking for More
Allan Odden and Sarah Archibald
Available from: Corwin Press, Phone: or (805) 499-9774, Fax: (805) 499-9774, Email order@corwin.sagepub.com (2000)

Describes actual resource reallocation practices and the realities of the resource reallocation process using examples from the schools that they have studied, as well as schools that others have studied. Tells the story of how schools can finance expensive program needs by describing the vast array of decisions that must be made, including how to pay for the new strategies.

1999

Can Public Schools Learn from Private Schools? Case Studies in the Public and Private Nonprofit Sectors
Richard Rothstein, Martin Carnoy, and Luis Benveniste
Available from: Economic Policy Institute, 1660 L Street, NW, Suite 1200, Washington, DC 20036 (1999)

Reports on case studies of eight public and eight private schools conducted to determine whether there are any identifiable and transferable private school practices that public schools can adopt in order to improve student outcomes. The evidence from interviews with teachers, administrators, and parents should inform policy debates about school choice, vouchers, public school funding, and other education issues.

School-based Financing
Margaret Goertz and Allan Odden, editors
Available from: Corwin Press, 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks, CA 91320-2218. Phone: 805-499-9774 (1999)

Addresses the critical issues and challenges facing state and district policymakers as they work to develop school-based funding policies and related resource data systems. Offers a conceptual overview of the issues involved in designing, implementing, and evaluating school-based financing policies. It reports on the experiences of three countries (England, Canada, and Australia) that have enacted school-based financing policies and discusses approaches to funding schools in the United States.

School Finance: A Policy Perspective (Second Edition)
Allan R. Odden and Lawrence O. Picus
Available from: McGraw-Hill Companies, P.O. Box 182604, Columbus, OH 43272 (August 1999)

Completely updated, this book discusses how recent research in school finance, resource allocation and use for higher performance, site-based management of schools, and teacher compensation may impact the funding of our nation's schools in the opening years of the new millennium.

1998

Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources
Allan R. Odden and Carolyn Busch
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (April 1998)

Looks at the inefficiencies in current education spending, examines varied approaches to school-based financing, and offers recommendations for restructuring financing systems to meet ambitious reform goals. Proposes ways to make funding more equitable across districts, outlines the various elements that make school-based management work, and describes the key roles and responsibilities for the district even in a decentralized system.

1997

From Cashbox to Classroom: The Struggle for Fiscal Reform and Education Change in New Jersey
William A. Firestone, Margaret E. Goertz, and Gary Natriello
Available from: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027 (1997)

Shows how school finance reform policies affect the capacity of both rich and poor school districts to serve their students. Describes the impact of school finance litigation and legislation in New Jersey. Chapters describe the judicial and state policy context of education in New Jersey; examines the impact of New Jersey's Quality Education Act on the fiscal equity of the state funding system; and discusses policy implication in terms of the educational, financial, and political dimensions.

1996

Restructuring in the Classroom: Teaching, Learning, and School Organization
Richard F. Elmore, Penelope L. Peterson, and Sarah J. McCarthey
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (March 1996)

Takes the reader into classrooms at three elementary schools for a detailed look at how teachers responded to changes in structure in their schools. The authors interviewed principals, teachers, parents, support staff, and central office personnel to produce in-depth case studies of schools at various stages of restructuring.

Rewards and Reform: Creating Educational Incentives that Work
Susan H. Fuhrman and Jennifer O'Day, editors
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (April 1996)

Explains the underlying issues surrounding incentives and reform and provides a framework for future research and policy. Examines alternative ways of thinking about teacher compensation and it suggests how states could revise formulas based on classroom or teacher units that present barriers to flexible class sizes and scheduling. The authors draw from sources including studies of reforms in Vermont and New York City; private sector research on management; current theories of motivation and organizational development; and studies of performance incentives.

1995

Education Leadership for America's Schools
Allan Odden, with the assistance of Eleanor Odden
Available from: McGraw-Hill Companies, P.O. Box 182605, Columbus, OH 43218-2605. Phone: 1-800-262-4729, Fax: 1-614-759-3644, Email: customer.service@mcgraw-hill.com (1995)

Designed for use as a core text for introductory courses in educational administration. At the same time, its focus on school reform and policymaking make it adaptable to courses in school leadership and school policy. The book's goal is to show how our existing knowledge base can be used to achieve a coherent, schoolwide program of action keyed to the national educational goals that are emerging from current reform efforts.

1994

Choices and Consequences: Contemporary Policy Issues in Education
Ronald G. Ehrenberg, editor
Available from: ILR Press, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901 (1994)

Analyzes the characteristics of teachers in American public schools and asks how to assure an adequate flow of people into the teaching profession, particularly in math and science. Also examines the effects different sequences of teachers have on pupil performance, suggesting that a teacher's subject-matter preparation has a decisive effect on student achievement. Explores the significance of students' choices about higher education.

School-based Management: Organizing for High Performance
Susan Albers Mohrman, Priscilla Wohlstetter, and Associates
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (October 1994)

Examines the school-based management (SBM) strategies that hold the most promise for increasing organizational effectiveness. Basing their approach on the pioneering "high-involvement" model, the authors reveal the need to go beyond thinking about SBM as a simple transfer of power and to view it as a change in organizational design. Successful SBM depends upon the development of a shared understanding of a new way of operating. The challenge is to redesign an organization so that it enables educators to engage in the extensive learning required to adopt new approaches to teaching and learning, involves them in the continuous improvement of performance, and promotes the involvement and responsiveness of the school to the diverse needs of the community.

1993

Decentralization and School Improvement: Can We Fulfill the Promise?
Jane Hannaway and Martin Carnoy, editors
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (March 1993)

Do decentralization reforms hold real promise for American education? Is there a relationship between the structure of the system and its performance? What can we learn about decentralization from history, from other industries, from other public sectors, and from other countries? And what risks does decentralization entail? Eight distinguished contributors examine these and other questions related to the likely effects of decentralizing school governance on educational practice.

Teaching for Understanding: Challenges for Policy and Practice
David K. Cohen, Milbrey W. McLaughlin, and Joan E. Talbert, editors
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (February 1993)

Leading experts on teaching and policy research provide concrete illustrations of what teaching for understanding entails. They show, for example, how to foster the knowledge, capacity, and professional beliefs essential for teachers to move beyond a "teach and test" approach to analytic reflection on classroom life and their relationship to students' learning. And they describe the collegial relations and institutional arrangements that support or inhibit the process of teachers and students working together to develop knowledge.

1992

Redesigning Teaching: Professionalism or Bureaucracy?
William A. Firestone and Beth D. Bader
Available from: SUNY Press, State University Plaza, Albany, NY 12246-0001. Email: info@sunypress.edu (1992)

Provides concrete case studies of school districts implementing teacher reforms. The cases describe the changes, give the history and dynamics of each project, examine how teachers respond to new policies and procedures, and tell how state policy affects local efforts to change teaching. Identifies challenges that state governments, school administrators, and teacher associations must face if they really want to professionalize teaching.

Rethinking School Finance: An Agenda for the 1990s
Allan R. Odden, editor
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (August 1992)

Focuses on the financial dimensions of education reform including school-based budgeting, incentives, teacher compensation, school-linked services, and interstate fiscal disparities. Provides new information and analysis that can be used by policymakers to design and enact policy, by education leaders to tailor local responses, and by analysts to raise new questions and probe uncharted dimensions of public school finance.

1990

Restructuring Schools: The Next Generation of Educational Reform
Richard F. Elmore, editor
Available from: Jossey-Bass Inc., Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, San Francisco, CA 94104 (April 1990)

Offers a comprehensive look at the many varied and often conflicting proposals for restructuring schools. Analyzes efforts proposed to address problems such as high teacher turnover, outdated curricula, and unresponsive school bureaucracies. Discusses the resources required to make these efforts successful, the practical issues involved, and implications for administrators, policymakers and teachers.

Last update: October, 2006

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