Scaling Toward Utopia or Dystopia: Challenges to Preserving Organizational Values Through Growth

Conversation 1: Mr. G and Neil (2004)

Mr. G sat in his office planning tomorrow’s morning circle, his history lesson, and observation feedback for the principal of Douglass Academy High School. He was busy, but it was a very satisfying busy. He looked around his office at the various sources of joy: costumes for history class, two djembe drums that served as symbolic gathering instruments for his middle school’s morning circles, and student work that could easily have been thought the work of 10th graders rather than sixth graders. When he met Neil at a state charter policy seminar almost 10 years ago, he could only have dreamed of this. He was leading a school that truly felt like a community, he still could teach middle school history, and the results were promising. Even the high school was proving successful. He had been nervous about opening a second school after only 4 years of operating their middle school, but adding a grade year-by-year had allowed for steady growth. Furthermore, they were working with family—students they had taught since fifth grade. Families were a driving force in Mr. G’s ultimate decision to open the high school. These ruminations on the high school reminded him that he had more than 50 college recommendation letters to write. Every single student in the newly matriculated senior class would be applying to college, and their scores would open many doors for them. He could barely contain his smile, remembering how nervous the seniors were only a few years ago on their first day of fifth grade coming to school in the abandoned bank building that the city had provided for his new school.

“You look happy!” His memory lane stroll was interrupted by a familiar face at the door.

“Neil, my friend, it’s been too long! Grab a seat.”

“G, you know we’d see a lot more of each other if you would just give in. I know you love running the middle school and teaching history, but we have money in the budget for folks to take on those roles so that you can properly give your attention to supporting both the middle and high school, and the new middle school next year.”

“You’ll have to drag me out of here.”

“I know that all too well. Honestly, my friend, it’s one of the many reasons that I knew you were my man for this project.”

This was not the first time that Neil had said that, and Mr. G hated it. Douglass Academy was Mr. G’s brainchild, Neil was the money man—something Mr. G believed to be an unfortunate but necessary requirement for schools. Furthermore, this was not some “project;” this was everything. Whenever Neil suggested that Mr. G was “my man” for the project, Mr. G could not help feeling like a tool in Neil’s more important plans—but what could be more important than Douglass? Mildly irritated, Mr. G got down to business.

“So what brings you to our neck of the woods today, Neil?”

“Have you given any thought to the merger?”

“I have. We are not a business; we are a school. Grow or die doesn’t quite apply to us.”

“Forgive me. Merger is the wrong word—you know that. This is not about growing for the sake of growth. This is about kids. We are coalescing with some like-minded folks to provide more kids and families access to a great education. I receive dozens of letters, calls, emails each week from parents—even kids—requesting a seat at Douglass. I know you are getting those letters too. We have a responsibility here, G.”

“I know. I know. But do we need to join these other schools. They are not Douglass Academy. Why partner with them? Why not just do this ourselves? We have provided a wonderful community for students and families in our city. We can keep doing that and grow in the way we have to support more students and families in this city.”

“G, we have been at this for eight years—in that time we have only served a few hundred students in just one city. I am proud of the work we have done, but there are millions of students receiving a subpar education. They don’t need Douglass in another eight years. They need Douglass now. They are in school now. This is their life—their futures. When we started this, we agreed to provide an incredible educational opportunity for as many students as possible. This is our charge. These other schools aren’t Douglass . . . yet. They are likeminded. Many have visited our schools multiple times and tried to replicate our work. The hard part is done—they are willing. If we are part of the same organization, we can help them replicate what we are doing here for families in four other cities where students have been failed by public education.”

Neil knew how to tug at his heartstrings. “You are a hell of a salesman. Okay. I’m in.”

Conversation 2: Mr. G, Neil, and Thomas Buchanan (2010)

Five years have passed since Douglass merged with other charters to form Extraordinary Schools. Mr. G continues to lead the founding Douglass Middle School and teach history; he also serves on the Extraordinary Schools board of trustees and is finding himself perpetually pulled away from Douglass. Neil no longer has a formal role within the organization, now serving as the chair of the board of trustees for Extraordinary. Aside from advising and leading Extraordinary through his board seat, he has turned his attention to new edupreneural endeavors. In their stead, in 2005 Neil brought in Thomas Buchanan as managing director of the Douglass Academy region of the CMO. Fresh off a fellowship with New Leaders for New Schools, Buchanan implemented a system of Interim Assessments to improve the culture of data-driven instruction (DDI). In addition to implementing his system of DDI, from 2005 to 2010, Buchanan has catalyzed significant growth for Douglass Academy, growing from two middle schools and a high school to four middle schools, three elementary schools, and a high school. Despite this scaling, families demonstrate their persistent desire to enroll their children as the lottery and waiting list at Douglass continue to grow. Through this growth, he has codified various school systems and instructional practices to ensure consistency across schools.

Mr. G sat in his office clicking through a robust excel spreadsheet cataloging student performance data on interim assessments while waiting for Neil and Tom to arrive. The data looked strong across all Douglass schools. Although this is what he was hoping for, something felt missing. Scanning his office, his eyes move from his various historical costumes, djembe drums, and pictures from the past decade of student trips, among other mementos of his school. He thinks about how this compares with the Douglass schools he has visited recently. They have the trappings of Douglass—morning circles, the intensity, and the focus on instructional leadership—but something in the DNA is missing. Instead of costumes, leaders’ offices are covered with poster prints of student data. Even the morning circles he visited in the past month were all about data, studying, homework—no fables, no John Lewis, no Frederick Douglass, no Rosa Parks, no Cesar Chavez, and no stories. In fact, the more he thought about it, all the schools looked alike. Douglass Middle School 1 was the outlier. Even teachers looked the same, teaching the same curriculum since Tom had enacted shared curriculum across the elementary and middle schools, and teaching in the same ways per the book that one of the Extraordinary Schools managing directors had just published on teaching practice. Furthermore, all the teachers were so young. The staff at Douglass 1 was a group of dinosaurs compared with the teachers and leadership teams in the other schools. Douglass 1 was like the rebellious middle child in a family of Type A personalities.

He knew that Tom and Neil would be expecting him to sign off on the proposed contract with McKinsey and Company. He still was not convinced that they needed to allocate that much money to consultants—couldn’t they do this in-house? That money could be much better spent going to kids and teachers. His door opened.

“Gentlemen—come in. Take a load off.”

Neil, ever gregarious, jumped in first. “How are things at Douglass, my old friend?”

“You should ask Tom—he has the 40,000 foot view.”

Far more reticent, Tom replied, “The ship is steady. Work ahead, but steady.”

Mr. G found Tom to be enigmatic—a quiet force. He had a clear vision for systems-level leadership in ways that Mr. G did not. At the same time, Mr. G could never imagine him running his own school or teaching. Trying to crack his shell a little, Mr. G boisterously responded, “Neil—how could you forget? A big congratulations is in order.” Pulling a book from under a stack of papers, Mr. G continued, “Tom, I am not sure when you found time to write this thing, but it is very impressive. I think this will help a lot of schools be data driven!”

Neil clapped Tom on the back and, with a slight smile, Tom replied, “Such flowers can only be tended in fertile ground. I am grateful to you both for the schools you’ve created.”

Mr. G smiled expecting a more effusive response from someone who had just published his first book. Tom was not one for small talk, so Mr. G got down to business. “So, gentlemen, I read the McKinsey proposal. I am not sure. It’s a lot of money. Can’t we handle this in-house?”

As if awaiting this answer, Neil jumped in. “Are you ready to step down from Douglass 1? If you take a leadership role with Extraordinary outside of your board responsibilities, then yes we can handle this in-house. But, if you are staying here, then I think this is our only option.”

“It’s a lot of money. We have great people here.”

Tom paused for a long time. Mr. G got the sense that Tom’s pauses were not pauses pregnant with thought but calculated effort to say precisely the right words. “Yes, I think this is the right move for Douglass and Extraordinary. We always say ‘one school, one mission,’ but we are multiple bands with many discordant sounds right now. This will help to orchestrate the right conductor for the CMO. Furthermore, while we will spend money now, it is an investment for future funding. We can’t exclusively bring funders to Douglass, we need to show them all Extraordinary Schools are extraordinary. While Douglass has an incredible reputation, the CMO is lagging. KIPP is navigating the same inconsistency across schools. If we can figure out how to replicate at scale, we’ll be the top CMO in the country—the model from which others will draw. If we get this right, we are a shoo-in for the Broad Prize and the federal CSP CMO grant, not to mention Gates, Walton, Charter School Growth Fund, New Schools Venture Fund, and more.”

Mr. G was not sold. He got the feeling that all of this benefited Tom. As the leading managing director, he was best positioned for a CMO-level leadership position. Furthermore, positioning Extraordinary in the way Tom was describing would only bolster book sales.

Neil recognized that Tom had swung and missed. He knew how to get Mr. G on board. “G, you’ve seen the results from the other schools. They are not replicating our results here. They may be mission-aligned, but they are not meeting the mission. These results are real kids in 4 other cities who deserve a great education, but we are not providing them the education they deserve. Remember what you used to say in morning circles, Dr. King spoke of the ‘fierce urgency of now.’ I know it is a lot of money, but de facto that money is going to teachers and students if we can repair the systems at our other schools to ensure quality experiences.”

Mr. G thought about Neil’s pitch. Even if he was not fully satisfied with the cookie-cutter schools he witnessed in his own region, Douglass was miles ahead of what he had seen visiting Extraordinary Schools in other cities. If this could provide better outcomes for kids, it was worth it. He thought of John Lewis: “If not us, then who? If not now, then when? You have my vote.”

Conversation 3: Mr. G and McKinsey Consultant (2013)

Mr. G had noticed an even more pronounced change in the 2 or so years that Extraordinary had been working with McKinsey and Company. Each time he visited a Douglass Academy school, it appeared that his earlier observations had only become more pronounced: teachers were teaching in the same way, teachers were teaching the same lesson plans verbatim, and the fixation on data had risen to an obsession. He did not recognize the schools he had founded. Teachers had limited autonomy. Students and teachers did not seem happy. He also never seemed to see familiar faces. More than once he went looking for a teacher who had impressed him the year before only to find that they had left Douglass. He was increasingly less surprised at this—the teacher turnover rates were alarming. The student turnover rates were no better. In the early days, it felt like a tectonic shift to lose a student, and most student turnover was simply because the family had moved. Now, families were leaving Douglass to return to the district. Mr. G had engaged in increasing numbers of conversations with families disappointed with their treatment by Douglass school leaders and teachers. Again, he was not surprised here—more than once he had seen shocking treatment of students: yelling, dragging, and shaming. Douglass was being audited by the state for its suspension numbers. He was spending more time at the high school because his protégé was leading the school and had preserved some semblance of the old Douglass. The middle and the elementary schools, however, looked like a strange mix of the traditional public schools that he had left and military boot camp. Yet student scores were strong for larger groups of students, so he perpetually felt like the outlier in meetings if he said anything related to drifting from organizational values or mission.

He was looking forward to chatting with consultants from McKinsey and Company. He was not sure what the meeting would entail, but he was hoping for an opportunity to share his thoughts. Upon arriving to the conference room, he realized that this was not the listening session for which he had hoped. Or perhaps it was; although, Mr. G would be the one listening.

“It is an honor to meet you, Mr. G. I’ve heard so much about you.”

Mr. G shook the consultant’s hands. He was first surprised by how young she was. She could not have been more than 25 years of age. Second, he was surprised that, as the founder of Douglass, he was not meeting with someone more senior or a team of folks. Ever humble, he shook away his surprise and attempted to remain open-minded. “Great to meet you as well.”

“I know you are a busy man, so I promise to keep this as quick as possible. Today, I am hoping to share with you some of the high-level recommendations we’ve distilled from our time in Extraordinary thus far. Because you are such an important symbolic leader in the community, we think it imperative to share our findings and recommendations with you.”

Mr. G balked at “symbolic leader” and that they were clearly uninterested in his perspective, but he signaled for her to continue.

“It is clear that the practices at Douglass are . . . well . . . excuse the pun . . . extraordinary, and it is our hope to replicate such practices across the whole landscape of Extraordinary Schools. While it may temporarily impact the Douglass region, we are recommending that Tom Buchanan move to a full-time position with the CMO as Chief Schools Officer. With this reorganization, we want to carry all of Douglass’s curricular and instructional practice CMO-wide. For instance, we will recommend that all Extraordinary Schools use the same interim assessments that Douglass uses, which will allow for consistent comparative data across schools. Furthermore, we will recommend that all Extraordinary Schools use shared curriculum and lesson plans in the way that Tom has piloted with the Douglass Middle and Elementary Schools. Lastly, for now, we will recommend that at least some of summer PD brings all Extraordinary Schools teachers and leaders together in one large convening, and periodically throughout the year there are virtual touchpoints for Extraordinary teachers across regions. In addition to affirming alignment, we think this will bolster a sense of allegiance to Extraordinary Schools on top of teachers’ identification with their respective regions. There are, of course, other recommendations, but these are the ones that will most impact your day-to-day as a building-level leader.”

Mr. G nodded to indicate processing, but internally he was perturbed. Were these authentic external recommendations or did Extraordinary just pay a whole heap of money to rubber stamp Tom and Neil’s desires. Feeling disillusioned, and, perhaps, a little combative, Mr. G took a breath and asked, “What about our practices are extraordinary?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said that the practices at Douglass are pun intended ‘extraordinary.’ What about our practices are extraordinary?”

“Oh of course! Well right now Douglass under Tom’s leadership has demonstrated the greatest consistency across schools and the results in the Douglass region are leaps and bounds ahead of the other Extraordinary regions.”

“I know that Douglass is the most aligned and has the strongest results. But what is ‘extraordinary’ about the practices themselves?”

“Well in observations of schools across regions. Students at Douglass are the most compli . . . I mean there are significantly fewer behavioral issues. More time is focused on academics here than the other regions. There is just a high bar for excellence.”

Noting that she cut off “compliant,” he probed, “Would you send your children here?”

“I don’t have children, sir.”

“Hypothetically. Or siblings, cousins, nieces . . . would you send loved ones to Douglass?”

“Well, we don’t live in this city. It’s all contextual. These students need structure.”

Mr. G winced at the phrase these students. “Have you ever worked in education?”

Startled by the question and realizing she was on the defensive, the consultant worked to justify her experience. “Well with McKinsey, I have worked with other organizations in education to great outcomes. I took a few education classes at Yale. And, well I went to school myself, of course, so I have a good sense of education I believe. And, at Yale, I tutored in New Haven quite a bit. I also tutored when I was at The Lawrenceville School.”

“Wow. Lawrenceville—impressive school. Quite different from Douglass, no? And Yale. I’ve heard of that one too. One of these days, I’ll tell you about Tatiana Robinson, one of our alumni from about almost a decade ago– she went to Yale. Y’all might have been there at the same time—do you know Tatiana?”

“I don’t believe I do.”

He surprised himself when he grumbled, “Of course you don’t. . . .” While he was insinuating quite a bit in his response, he qualified so as not to offend: “. . . it’s a big school. Listen. I have to run, but just one more question for you. If you could recommend anything to increase joy at Douglass and across Extraordinary Schools, what would your team recommend?”

“Oh wow—joy? Well, I think these students have worked so hard to defy expectations, and I think really bragging about their performance data could be really joyful. In one school we visited, we saw posters in the hallways showing the schools results up against the city, the state, and even the state’s white students. I think that’s such a wonderful source of pride, and can really help infuse joy across the schools for the great work that is being done.”

Smiling politely, he mused, “yes, joy by data. That’s how we’ll do it. Well listen this has been illuminating. Thank you for sharing your work with me.”

Conversation 4: Mr. G’s Potential Letter of Resignation (2019)

The McKinsey reorganization and growth plan went into effect in 2015. Assessments and curriculum were now aligned across six cities and more than 50 schools—more than 20,000 students. Tom has served as the CSO since the reorganization and Neil is the chairman of the board. Mr. G has continued to lead Douglass Middle School 1, now for more than 20 years. While the tenets of the reorganization have come to fruition, the results have not met anticipated levels. The class of 2013 marked the highest scoring class on SATs, APS, GPA, state assessment data, and college acceptance and matriculation; since then, however, results have declined—in some places substantially. Teacher turnover is at an all-time high with multiple schools approximating 50% turnover rates from year to year. Students have protested their schooling experience in multiple schools and regions. Parents have filed formal complaints to charter authorizing bodies and state legislatures. In his last set of walkthroughs, he saw schools that were not much different from the school he had left to found Douglass or schools that looked like they came out of some dystopian fever dream or a peculiar mix of the two somehow. Nowhere he visited remotely resembled the school he had founded. No djembes. No morning circles. No smiles. No innovation. The only school that had some semblance of the old Douglass was his own middle school. Yet, even in his own school, the CMO controlled so much—daily lesson plans, instructional leader training, professional development, and so on. He no longer felt like he was the school leader. Constantly held up as the spiritual guide—the founder—he was some strange ghost haunting a new world. He experienced many sleepless nights pondering whether the 2018–2019 school year would be his last. He had been offered a position as clinical faculty at a nearby university teaching history methods courses to aspiring teachers. Would this be how he would close the curtain on more than three decades in public education? He wrote a letter of resignation as a thought experiment, although he remained unsure as to whether he would act upon it.

Dear Extraordinary Board,

I hereby submit my letter of resignation from the board of trustees for Extraordinary Schools and my resignation as Principal of the Extraordinary Middle School at which I work. While this might strike you as strange language to describe my current position, I am intentional here. Douglass Academy is no more. I am leaving Extraordinary Schools, not Douglass Academy. It feels generous to describe my role as a leader, rather I am simply an enforcer of Extraordinary policy. Anyone claiming to be a principal in this network serves the same function.

I am resigning because we’ve lost our way. I founded Douglass to provide students and families in our city with a schooling experience that was rigorous and joyful—a school to which they wanted to come to learn. A home. A family. I founded Douglass to provide passionate and motivated educators a pedagogical laboratory to innovate and create, a place of autonomy and collaboration, and a school to which they wanted to come to teach. A home. A family.

The schools I have visited this year and for the past many years are not the Douglass we founded and ran from 1997 to 2005, or even to 2013. Many are strange versions of the schools at which I worked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the schools I left forever dreaming of Douglass. I am confident that not a single person on this board, perhaps aside from Neil who was with me in the beginning, could articulate why we named our school Douglass Academy. It is named for Frederick Douglass—the abolitionist, the writer, the speaker, the journalist, the reformer, the visionary, the prophet. In the way that he edited his newspaper The North Star to be a guiding light through a dark time in our history, we named our school after Douglass. We hoped through pedagogical innovation, creativity, joy, hard work, and love that Douglass could be a north star for public education. Douglass Academy was a dream of what public education could be and, for the first decade of our existence, we were deep in that dream.

Growth was our problem. Like Rome, we got too big too fast. And like any empire, we expanded our way rather than in the way of the people. We came in believing we could save communities, to bring them under our control—our way or the highway. With each new school, we put up billboards and bus signs, instead of doing what we did in 1996, knocking on doors and asking families what kind of school they wanted for their children. Interviewing phenomenal educators and asking them about their dreamscape of a school.

While I cannot turn back the wheels of time, I depart with one request. Please stop growing. Our schools are not good, they are not innovative, and they are not a community. There are more than 20,000 students right now who deserve a better education than the one we are providing.

“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”—Mr. G.

Scaling Outwardly or Inwardly: Policy Landscapes and Pressures

The case invites conversation into the perpetual policy challenges associated with scaling up effective programs and the policy nuances of scaling within the world of school choice. In education, numerous large-scale studies of various reforms, e.g., early childhood programs, curriculums, and class size reductions, have revealed effects that underperform the notable gains evidenced in smaller scale evaluations of similar interventions (e.g., Heckman et al., 2013; Jepsen & Rivkin, 2009; Puma et al., 2012; Quint et al., 2015). Numerous researchers (e.g., Banerjee et al., 2017; Davis et al., 2017) have articulated the various challenges associated with scaling up, suggesting that success of programs may be, in part, driven by unique and difficult-to-replicate factors, such as distinctive leaders, teachers, and environments. For charter schools, replicability and scaling is particularly important as they are provided considerably more autonomy than their traditional public school counterparts in exchange for increased accountability. The autonomy–accountability exchange inherent within the charter is intended to promote charters as laboratories that generate innovative and successful practices to be shared with the district (Budde, 1996). Some charter authorizers encourage or even require that charter schools disseminate their “best practices” as part of their charter authorization (e.g., Illinois State Board of Education, 2016; Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2023; Volunteers of America–Minnesotata, n.d.). Charter schools in Massachusetts, for instance, are required by law to disseminate their “best practices” (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2023).

Since Ray Budde first proposed charters in the 1980s as “teams of teachers . . .‘chartered’ directly by a school board for a period of three to five years” where “no one—not the superintendent or the principal or any central office supervisors—would stand between the school board and the teachers when it came to matters of instruction” (Budde, 1996, p. 72), the charter movement has evolved. Scott and DiMartino (2010) argued, for instance, that “early visions of a movement characterized by community-centered and teacher-initiated schools are giving way to more market-driven and corporatized schools” (p. 171). While charters have been very successful, in many ways, at disseminating their work (McCluskey, 2023b; McCluskey & Narayanan, 2024), evidence suggests that efforts to replicate and scale have remained “in house.” Coalescing as Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), charters have expanded through traditional business models of growth, that is, franchised and corporate growth models (Scott & DiMartino, 2010). Miron et al. (2021) demonstrated the effect of these growth models, reporting that almost 50% of charter schools across the United States have come under the responsibility of for-profit and nonprofit management, and CMOs operate the majority serving more than 70% of students in managed schools, a substantial increase over the past decade (Woodworth et al., 2017). Numerous scholars have examined the challenges and effects of charters scaling through CMOs (e.g., Berends & Waddington, 2018; Farrell et al., 2012; Quinn et al., 2016). Farrell et al. (2014) found that “scaling-up too quickly or in ways that fall outside of the CMO’s mission can lead to serious consequences for the organization, its schools, and students” (p. 77). They concluded that “one size does not fit all” for CMO scale-up (p. 77). Yet, speaking to the marketized and ideological shifts in the movement (Schneider & Berkshire, 2020; Scott & DiMartino, 2010), Farrell et al. (2014) acknowledged that CMOs face pressure from funding foundations and policymakers to grow rapidly, rebuffing a large body of scholarship emphasizing to the importance of contextualized and localized place-based education (e.g., Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b; Smrekar & Crowson, 2015).

Engaging with this policy landscape and evolving reform movement can provide important context with which to analyze the pressure that Mr. G feels and the competing motivations at play in the case. In addition, engaging in the literature of scaling, growth, place-based education, and localism can provide important insights into the challenges facing Douglass and Extraordinary Schools, as well as offer potential insight into recommendations for leadership of a more effective scaling and growth trajectory.

Tinkering Toward Utopia

In their seminal book, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, Tyack and Cuban (1995) argued that rather than reforms changing schools, schools change reforms. They contemplate that “[s]ome innovations seem to die on contact with the institutional reality of the school. It is the rare reform that performs and persists precisely accordingly to plan” (p. 60). The case invites conversation into the challenges of school change and change at scale. The grammar of schooling is persistent (Tyack & Cuban, 1995). Even as early as 1904, Dewey dismissed conceiving of school organization “as something comparatively external and indifferent to educational purposes”; instead, he argues that “the manner in which the machinery of instruction bears upon the child . . . really controls the whole system” (p. 85). Engaging with notions of a grammar of schooling and with perpetual challenges to school reform can open dialogue into where Extraordinary leadership failed in its efforts to change and grow. Furthermore, it can open dialogue around the factors leading to Mr. G’s observations that his once pedagogical laboratory increasingly looked like the schools from which he departed.

Further exploration of Dewey (1904) may also open dialogue into the systemic and societal barriers surrounding the case. Dewey argued that problems in education emerge from causes

imbedded in the very structure of the school system—yes, even beyond that, in the structure of society itself. It is for this reason that mere changes in the mechanics of the school system, whether in administration or in the externals of subject-matter, turn out mere temporary devices. (p. 53)

Considering this argument, students can reconcile various impediments to Mr. G’s desire to provide an early version of Douglass to students widely. For instance, students may engage with the competing ideologies surrounding the charter school and school choice movement (Scott & DiMartino, 2010), the fiscal incentives driving key stakeholders within the case and more broadly (Schneider & Berkshire, 2020), and the problematic ideologies that certain sectors carry with them about students from urban schools (e.g., Albright et al., 2023; Hernández, 2016, 2022a, 2022b; Miller et al., 2022). In doing so, students can wrestle with the pronounced reform drift between Mr. G’s school and Tom Buchanan’s school, and how they affect students and teachers (McCluskey, 2023a, 2023c, 2024; McCluskey & Narayanan, in press; Narayanan & McCluskey, 2023).

Discussion Questions

The discussion questions provided below are a starting point for whole group or small group discussions that can be paired with additional teaching activities listed below.

Additional Learning Activities