A Handbook for Implementing School Improvement, eds. Edie Holcombe and Lydia L. McCue (Madison, WI: National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development, 1991).

This collection of essays on effective schools was created around the time that the Center for Effective Schools, then at the U. of Wisconsin--Madison, was also finalizing its large trainer and participant manuals or kits for implementing change in K-12 schools, under the overarching idea that all children can learn. This notion had been launched by the late Ron Edmonds a decade earlier. From 1983 to the early 1990s the Center and its partners demonstrated that, through adherence to Edmonds' correlates for effective schools, improvement for all students was possible--if the process of implementing appropriate change for a particular school or system was accomplished through disciplined planning and development involving all the stakeholders or constiuencies. These essays by over twenty of the leading proponent of this innovative approach form a very useful background for the why and how of the sections of the manuals, the steps in the process. The major product of this period was the major self-study manuals