Schools and Complexity

Christopher Edmund Trombly


As schools, districts, and the overall education system are complex entities, both the approaches taken to improve them and the methods used to study them must be similarly complex.  Simple solutions imposed with no regard for schools’ or districts’ unique contexts hold little promise, while seemingly insignificant differences between those contexts affect in seemingly disproportionate ways the quality and success with which they implement the same programs.  Context must be taken very much into account when initiatives are planned and implemented, as well as when their impacts are investigated.

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