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This section of the Handbook deals with the idea and necessity of extending educational change — conceptually and in action. Extending educational change matters for getting existing approaches to educational change to work more effectively in more places, and for deepening our understandings of and sensitivity to whose interests are at stake in educational change. Who benefits and who loses? How do these interests and how we address them affect what kinds of changes we pursue? What challenges does all this pose for the change process itself?

In the opening chapter to this section of the Handbook, Fink and Stoll review the contemporary field of educational change and ask why educational change is so difficult to understand and achieve in present times. They begin by discussing the historical, social and organizational forces that create continuity in education; which sustain structures and practices that in many cases may be outliving their usefulness. They then discuss four common and widely used approaches to bringing about educational change in the face of such continuity: school effectiveness, school improvement, school restructuring, and more recent orientations to school reculturing. Each of these approaches is examined clearly and also critically. Finally, Fink and Stoll turn to a number of agendas which they argue will continue to challenge the theory and practice of educational change in years to come — the need for a tighter connection between organizational change and developing better approaches to teaching and learning; the problem of motivating students in contexts of economic uncertainty; the difficulty of determining what kinds of leadership work best and are most practical in contexts of great complexity; the perennial problem of assessment and accountability; the relationship of change to teachers’ lives, and the importance of micropolitics. Reculturing, they propose, offers one of the most hopeful ways of providing an integrated solution to these many different challenges.

There is no greater context for educational change than that of globalization, nor no grander way of conceptualizing what educational change is about. Wells and her colleagues analyze how economic and political globalization are affecting the identity and independence of nation states, and the ways in which public education (like public health and welfare) are undergoing change within the states. They acknowledge that there is no agreement about how political and economic globalization have affected public education precisely, and they review and evaluate different theoretical claims about the globalization effect: from neo liberals, liberal-progressives (or modernizers), realists and critical theorists. The paradoxical juxtaposition of educational markets, privatization and decentralization with standardization of assessment and growing emphases on nationhood in the agendas of school reform is analyzed through these different approaches to globalization theory. This chapter also looks at the social and cultural effects of globalization on education again from different theoretical standpoints in terms of the growth of communism and the spread of visual and eletronic imagery. Wells and her colleagues examine the consequences of these influences for teaching and learning, the curriculum, and the ability to deal with difference. Globalization is reshaping students lives through market influences and symbolic concerns with identity and nationhood. Wells and her colleagues demonstrate how the immensely broad phenomenon of globalization is having very concrete effects on contemporary agendas of educational reform.

Market forces have been widely proposed as a solution to the alleged inflexibilities and inefficiencies of school bureaucracies in a rapid changing postmodern world. Subjecting public education to the rules of the market arouses great passion among educational reformers, whether they are in favour or opposed. In this chapter, Boyd and Lugg review the arguments and, most importantly the evidence about the effects that market forces of school choice have had upon public education. Seeking the “pragmatic, but precarious middle ground”, Boyd & Lugg move beyond absolute opposition to market influences of any kind, and beyond the nostalgic distortions through which past public bureaucracies are lavished with fake praise, to evaluate the evidence on marketization, as it has been played out in different contexts. They examine the contexts and causes of market-oriented influences in education, and succinctly summarize the key arguments of proponents and opponents. What is especially interesting about the chapter is the way its authors tread beyond conventional “left” and “right” positions on this issue, by sketching out what the moral and regulatory boundaries of market systems in education might reasonably be. The chapter contributes strongly to the debate on school choice and charter schools that are taking place in many jurisdictions.

Few change issues are more compelling for schools today than the introduction of new technologies. Computers in particular are widely advocated as harbingers of an educational revolution where children will have independent access to rich sources of information, be able to integrate and apply knowledge in sophisticated ways and where their teachers will become coaches, guides and facilitators to assist young people in the new forms of learning that will engage them. At the same time, critics of the computer revolution argue that much of it replaces education with entertainment, that the quality of information that can be accessed is often very poor, that children will learn in more and more isolated ways from each other, and that critical elements will be drained out of the educational process by focussing on technical competence alone. Bigum and Kenway take their readers through this highly contested and controversial field with a balanced and thoughtful review and evaluation of the main standpoints that educators take towards new technologies in education. They describe and critique the positions of groups they call the Boosters, the Doomsters, the Anti-Schoolers and the Critics — leading to their own exposition of a practically workable and educationally justifiable stance that schools might best take towards high technology and future schooling.

In this chapter, Heather-jane Robertson critiques the growth of corporate interest and involvement in public education. The chapter pulls no punches. It critiques the trend towards the corporalization of everything, including education. With extensive exemplification, Robertson describes how the corporate community has dramatically redirected educational policy, reshaped the discourse and language in which policy is conducted, intruded into the curriclum, redirected resources, influenced the standardization and testing movement, developed partnerships seeking to influence the practices of many individual schools, engaged in sponsorships, and other things besides. There is nothing necessary or inevitable, Robertson concludes, about the influence of the corporate sphere on educational change and she urges us to choose, for democracy, how or whether that influence should persist.

Sonia Nieto’s chapter points to the significant phenomenon of growing cultural diversity and the challenges it presents for educational change. Reviewing the evidence on ways of learning and what counts as learning in diverse cultures, and on the strong association between various levels of cultural diversity and poverty, Nieto argues that beyond the rhetoric, differences of race, culture, and language are rarely taken very seriously in educational reform efforts. Yet, she shows how taking cultural and linguistic diversity into account in educational reform initiatives, can make a real difference in student learning and achievement — and she outlines numerous, concrete and practical examples of how this can be and sometimes has been achieved. In the second part of her chapter, Nieto spells out some educational change implications of her findings. She argues for better preservice teacher education that will prepare teachers effectively to work in contexts of diversity; for a more positive view of the strengths to be drawn from cultural difference; for whole-school policies that are sensitive to diversity issues; and for making social justice central rather than peripheral to an educational reform agenda that is currently too preoccupied with other interests and concerns.

With cultural diversity comes linguistic diversity. This diversity has been created by growing rates of migration since the 1960s and by greater inter-cultural contact among nations as they try to resolve ecological and diplomatic problems together. In this chapter, Jim Cummins looks at the implications of linguistic diversity for educational change Cummins asks what it means to provide education in a growing number of contexts which are not merely bilingual, but which serve students from many different linguistic backgrounds in classrooms and their schools. Bilingualism, linguistic immersion, heritage languages, second language learning, and transformations in the entire organization of teaching and learning to accommodate classroom populations of great diversity are among the issues that Cummins addresses. The importance of these issues is pressed home with reference to research findings which indicate that when students lag behind in first language proficiency, they also lag behind in academic achievement and intelligence test scores despite their abilities in their own language. Failing to address the issue of linguistic diversity effectively leads to failure to capitalize on children’s academic potential. Cummins concludes with policy recommendations to address language issues as a focus for educational change, including changes in curriculum, teaching and learning, and the climate of the school.

One of the strongest social forces driving educational change — in classrooms, curriculum, teaching and leadership — is the changing role and position of women in society. But the effects of changing configurations of gender relations in education are not straightforward. In this chapter, Jill Blackmore discusses how stronger orientations to gender equity in children’s learning and educators’ careers frequently run against the grain of deep-seated cultural assumptions about gender, long-standing institutional practices that don’t easily accommodate changed gender relations, and parallel patterns of reform that seem to contradict or undermine many of the new directions otherwise being pursued in the name of gender equity. In particular, Blackmore scrutinizes how gender-based reforms fare in the context of an increased market orientation to educational change, where many gender-sensitive practices in classrooms, curriculum and even the hiring of school principals are often construed as bad for the school’s image in the marketplace of parental choice. Gender based reforms are also analyzed in the context of a new managerialism in education, where emphases on financial constraint and centralized accountability in rational systems of measurement and management, paradoxically mean that the growing numbers of women entering the school principal-ship turn into emotional ‘middle-managers’ of educational change — motivating their staff to work reasonably and committedly in an increasingly unreasonable world. Blackmore concludes by saying that gender-based reform in educational change is about much more than recruiting women into educational leadership, or embracing their caring styles of emotional managment, but also engineering much more fundamental shifts in the wider policy context of educational reform so that schools can be more responsive to gender based issues.

The last decade has seen a rise in research on and practices of school, family and community involvement in the education of youth. This trend can be attributed to a number of factors. Low achievement and high dropout rates, especially for poor and marginalized youth, have led educators and social scientists to become more aware of the importance of family and community involvement for school effectiveness and positive student outcomes. Moreover, communitarians and others have pointed to the loss of community and collective life that many people feel in their neighbourhoods, workplaces and schools as well. In this chapter, Sanders and Epstein make the case that in order for schools to educate all youth effectively, families and communities must become full partners in the process. Not all schools and not all nations, they point out, are at the same point in their work on partnerships. Some focus on parent participation on school councils; others concentrate more on choice of schools than on what happens to involve families after the choice is made; some are looking deeply into helping families understand their children’s school subjects and curricula; and others are working on improving general communications. Drawing on Epstein’s model of different forms of school-community relationship, this chapter summarizes and discusses research studies collected from social scientists in twenty nations to increase our understanding of how partnership approaches are linked to the processes and outcomes of educational change and school improvement.