Donald Peurach | University of Michigan (original) (raw)
Papers by Donald Peurach
The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined ... more The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a contemporary perspective, with an emergent improvement movement in tension with an institutionalized evidence movement. By contrast, this essay provides an historical perspective through a “geological analysis” of US education reform. This analysis has the improvement movement atop macro-level policy contexts that are layers-deep, and as potentially integral to a public education enterprise that has been evolving for centuries: at the policy level, from resource-forward to practice-forward innovation and improvement; at the local level, from school systems to education systems to learning systems. This analytic approach and framework suggest the n...
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage compe... more This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage competing pressures in their institutional environments. Across all systems, leaders responded to system-specific puzzles by (re)building systemwide educational infrastructures to support instructional coherence and framed these efforts as rooted in concerns about pragmatic organizational legitimacy. These efforts surfaced several challenges related to educational equity; leaders framed their responses to these challenges as tied to both pragmatic and moral organizational legitimacy. To address these challenges, leaders turned to an array of disparate government and nongovernment organizations in their institutional environments to procure and coordinate essential resources. Thus, the press for instructional coherence reinforced their reliance on an incoherent institutional environment.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2022
Research in Education, 2022
Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and man... more Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and management of classroom instruction in US public schools. While this delegation afforded teachers professional autonomy in their work, it has also resulted in disparities in students’ educational experiences and outcomes within and between classrooms, schools, and systems. In the effort to improve instruction and reduce disparities for students on a large scale, one reform effort in the US has focused on building instructionally focused education systems (IFESs) where central office and school leaders collaborate with teachers to organize and manage instruction. These efforts are playing out in a variety of contexts in the US, including in public school districts, non-profits, and other educational networks, and it is shifting how teachers carry out the day-to-day work of instruction. In this comparative case study, we investigate two IFESs in which efforts to improve instruction pushed aga...
The following analysis has two aims: to examine the potentially negative consequences of summativ... more The following analysis has two aims: to examine the potentially negative consequences of summative impact evaluations on school improvement networks as a strategy for large scale high school reform; and to examine formative "developmental evaluations" as an alternative. The analysis suggests that it is possible to leverage theory and research to propose meaningful criteria for developmental evaluation, and a developmental evaluation of a leading, high school-level school improvement networks suggests that these criteria are useful for generating formative feedback for network stakeholders. With that, the analysis suggests next steps in refining formal methods for developmental evaluation.
Advances in Research on Reading Recovery, 2018
This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising inte... more This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising integrated, school-wide programs of improvement for chronically-weak schools. Comprehensive school reform has been one of the dominant reform movements of the past 20 years. While originally performed by a small number of design teams, the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform has begun to spread among state education agencies, districts, commercial publishers, and others as they collaborate to integrate curriculum, assessment, and professional development into coherent programs of improvement for schools. The study has two goals. The first is to develop a conceptual framework characterizing the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform. The second is to use that framework to explore the work of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF). Between 1988-2000, SFAF rose to unusual prominence for its success designing and managing comprehensive school reform. Between 2001-2005, concurrent with the passage and implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, SFAF fell into decline, its continued viability in question. This study uses a conceptual framework developed around the ideas of managing interdependence and full world design to explore the work of SFAF between 1998-2005 in order to understand its rise to prominence and its subsequent decline. Drawing from the case of SFAF, I argue that we are just now beginning to understand the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform as a critical component of broader, systemic reform. I argue that our nascent understanding bears on evaluation of the progress of comprehensive school reform, the prospects of popularizing the work among institutionalized organizations, and the implications for networked charter schools as an alternative to comprehensive school reform.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationEducation historyEducational administrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125474/2/3192752.pd
Peabody Journal of Education, 2020
Review of Educational Research, 2020
A group of collaborative approaches to education research sits uneasily within the existing infra... more A group of collaborative approaches to education research sits uneasily within the existing infrastructure for research and development in the United States. The researchers in this group hold themselves to account to ways of working with schools, families, and communities that are different from the ways envisioned by models for education research promoted in U.S. policies and endorsed by U.S. federal agencies. Those models, widely supported by funders, privilege the research priorities of individual investigators and regularly yield products and findings with little relevance to educational practice. In this article, we review four collaborative approaches: Community-based Design Research, Design-based Implementation Research, Improvement Science in Networked Improvement Communities, and the Strategic Education Research Partnership. Through a participatory process involving developers and advocates for these approaches, we identified a set of interconnected principles related to c...
Handbook of Research on Online Discussion-Based Teaching Methods, 2020
MOOC designers seeking to address evolving ambitions of MOOCs to support workforce development co... more MOOC designers seeking to address evolving ambitions of MOOCs to support workforce development confront a fundamental design dilemma: on the one hand, the self-paced nature of online learning is efficient for busy learners working alone to acquire new knowledge and capabilities; on the other hand, the self-paced, often-isolated nature of online learning complicates designing MOOCs that motivate and sustain the type of engagement necessary to support learners in mobilizing new knowledge and capabilities in practice contexts and in collaboration with other professionals. The authors offer an account of their efforts to create opportunities for deep learning in large-scale, open-access learning environments through the creation and instantiation of a new instructional model called self-directed/community-supported learning. This model aims to draw diverse learners around the world into a community of discourse and practice through coordinated video content presentations, web-based enri...
Education, 2020
The purpose of this contribution to Oxford Bibliographies in Education is to establish context fo... more The purpose of this contribution to Oxford Bibliographies in Education is to establish context for the series of articles on improvement-focused educational research, a developing field aimed at producing and using knowledge to address problems, needs, and opportunities grounded deeply in practice contexts. This article frames the policy context of educational innovation and improvement in the United States from which improvement-focused educational research has emerged and in which it is currently developing. We conceptualize “policy” broadly as initiatives and movements that aim to drive the agenda for (and pursuit of) educational innovation as advanced both (a) within and by branches and agencies of government and (b) outside of government, by philanthropies, non-profit organizations, associations, and interest groups. We focus specifically on federal and national policy initiatives since the 1950s that have shared the central priorities of improvement-focused educational researc...
Educational Policy, 2019
The institutional environment of U.S. school systems has changed considerably over a quarter cent... more The institutional environment of U.S. school systems has changed considerably over a quarter century as standards and test-based accountability became central ideas in policy texts and discourses about improving education. We explore how U.S. school systems are managing in this changed environment by focusing on system leaders’ sense-making about their environments as they attempt to build educational systems to improve instruction, the core technology of schooling. We identify the policy texts and discourses system leaders notice and their framings, interpretations, and uses of these cues as they build educational infrastructures to support more coherent instructional visions. We argue that school systems’ educational infrastructure building efforts were intended at coupling their systems’ formal organization with particular environmental cues in an effort to influence classroom instruction. In turn, we argue that these educational infrastructure building efforts can simultaneously...
Educational Policy, 2019
A sustained policy press to improve quality and reduce disparities in public education is driving... more A sustained policy press to improve quality and reduce disparities in public education is driving U.S. public school districts to organize and manage instruction for excellence and equity. The purpose of this analysis is to elaborate and to animate patterns and dilemmas in this work. The analysis identifies five domains of work central to this transformation, four patterns in the distribution of this work among central offices and schools, and four dilemmas endemic to the work. It then uses the preceding to frame vignettes of that work and those dilemmas as playing out in four different public school districts.
Educational Policy, 2019
Institutional theory, an important research tradition in analysis of schooling, has examined the ... more Institutional theory, an important research tradition in analysis of schooling, has examined the development of mass schooling in the United States and worldwide. But research in this tradition has given little attention to the internal working of mass school systems, to problems of inequality and the quality of instruction, or to relating those problems to the organization and management of mass school systems. Building on the first three articles, which document how education system building has become a key instrument in efforts to improve the quality and equality of educational opportunity for students, we argue for a program of comparative research on education system building cross-nationally. We outline a program of research that would extend our comparative approach to studying school systems’ efforts to build, use and manage educational infrastructure as they attempt to transition to education systems in the United States by including such efforts in several other nations.
Journal of Educational Administration, 2019
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships among governmental organizations, n... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships among governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and the organization and management of instruction in US public education, with the aim of raising issues for cross-national research among countries in which the involvement of non-governmental organizations is increasing. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured in four parts: an historical analysis of the architecture and dynamics of US public education; an analysis of contemporary reform efforts seeking to improve quality and reduce inequities; an analysis of ways that legacy and reform dynamics manifest in two US public school districts; and a discussion of considerations for cross-national research. Findings In US public education, dependence on non-governmental organizations for instructional resources and services is anchored in deeply institutionalized social, political and economic values dating to the country’s founding and that continu...
Review of Research in Education, 2019
In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the ... more In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the pursuit of excellence and equity in U.S. public education, with each other and with classroom instruction. There was little in that policy moment to predict that these reforms would sustain, and much to predict otherwise. Yet, nearly three decades hence, many public school districts are working earnestly to pursue the central aims of the reforms: all students engaging rich instructional experiences to master ambitious content and tasks at the same high standards. That begs a question: What happens when new educational ambitions collide with legacy educational institutions—not in a policy moment but across a historical moment? This chapter takes up that question by reviewing the rise of mass public schooling in pursuit of universal access, a historic pivot toward instructionally focused education systems in pursuit of excellence and equity, and changing patterns in instructional organizat...
Educational Researcher, 2017
The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied... more The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied to test-based accountability and market competition became commonplace. We examine the issues that school systems face in this changing environment, to identify considerations for researchers interested in reform as educational system building. We highlight a central dilemma: Systems manage environmental pressures to become more coherent enterprises that focus on tested outcomes while managing the inherited differentiated organizations and environmental pressures which support these enterprises. We identify four activity domains that are defined by these competing pressure: consensus on outcomes; infrastructure to connect outcomes with instruction; recruitment that is aligned with outcomes; and competing environmental pressures.
Educational Researcher, 2016
In late 2015, the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act strengthened federal commitment to th... more In late 2015, the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act strengthened federal commitment to the use of evidence in educational innovation, focusing squarely on increasing the impact of innovation on educational outcomes. Concurrently, articles published in Educational Researcher examined new potential to increase the success of educational innovation through researcher-practitioner collaboration, focusing squarely on continuous improvement grounded in problems of practice. This essay examines how impact and improvement play out in the leadership of network-based improvement initiatives. Integrating critical scholarship with analysis of 20 i3-funded networks, the argument is that the practical challenges of network leaders vary inversely with system-level innovation infrastructure, which currently provides strong support for evaluating impact but weak support for continuous improvement. Thus, additional potential to increase the success of educational innovation is argued to lie i...
Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2016
ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on Reading Recovery situates the enterprise in a ... more ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on Reading Recovery situates the enterprise in a broader educational reform context that has placed a priority on developing and fielding large-scale, systemic interventions that support ambitious instructional practice and student outcomes. Within this context, Reading Recovery is examined as an evolving, adaptive epistemic community in which tutors, teachers, leaders, coaches, and developers collaborate to produce, use, and refine the practical knowledge needed to support and sustain success among large numbers of struggling readers. Viewing Reading Recovery as an epistemic community provides a framework for more deeply engaging the articles in this special issue, for reflecting on Reading Recovery's history of success, and for speculating about Reading Recovery's future in rapidly evolving policy and reform contexts.
The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined ... more The aim of this essay is to advance understandings of current efforts to democratize disciplined approaches to educational innovation and improvement in the US and other countries, with a specific focus on the macro-level policy contexts of improvement research in education. In the US, earlier analyses examined these policy contexts from a contemporary perspective, with an emergent improvement movement in tension with an institutionalized evidence movement. By contrast, this essay provides an historical perspective through a “geological analysis” of US education reform. This analysis has the improvement movement atop macro-level policy contexts that are layers-deep, and as potentially integral to a public education enterprise that has been evolving for centuries: at the policy level, from resource-forward to practice-forward innovation and improvement; at the local level, from school systems to education systems to learning systems. This analytic approach and framework suggest the n...
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage compe... more This article examines how leaders in public, private, and hybrid educational systems manage competing pressures in their institutional environments. Across all systems, leaders responded to system-specific puzzles by (re)building systemwide educational infrastructures to support instructional coherence and framed these efforts as rooted in concerns about pragmatic organizational legitimacy. These efforts surfaced several challenges related to educational equity; leaders framed their responses to these challenges as tied to both pragmatic and moral organizational legitimacy. To address these challenges, leaders turned to an array of disparate government and nongovernment organizations in their institutional environments to procure and coordinate essential resources. Thus, the press for instructional coherence reinforced their reliance on an incoherent institutional environment.
Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 2022
Research in Education, 2022
Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and man... more Historically, teachers had been delegated the primary responsibility for the organization and management of classroom instruction in US public schools. While this delegation afforded teachers professional autonomy in their work, it has also resulted in disparities in students’ educational experiences and outcomes within and between classrooms, schools, and systems. In the effort to improve instruction and reduce disparities for students on a large scale, one reform effort in the US has focused on building instructionally focused education systems (IFESs) where central office and school leaders collaborate with teachers to organize and manage instruction. These efforts are playing out in a variety of contexts in the US, including in public school districts, non-profits, and other educational networks, and it is shifting how teachers carry out the day-to-day work of instruction. In this comparative case study, we investigate two IFESs in which efforts to improve instruction pushed aga...
The following analysis has two aims: to examine the potentially negative consequences of summativ... more The following analysis has two aims: to examine the potentially negative consequences of summative impact evaluations on school improvement networks as a strategy for large scale high school reform; and to examine formative "developmental evaluations" as an alternative. The analysis suggests that it is possible to leverage theory and research to propose meaningful criteria for developmental evaluation, and a developmental evaluation of a leading, high school-level school improvement networks suggests that these criteria are useful for generating formative feedback for network stakeholders. With that, the analysis suggests next steps in refining formal methods for developmental evaluation.
Advances in Research on Reading Recovery, 2018
This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising inte... more This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising integrated, school-wide programs of improvement for chronically-weak schools. Comprehensive school reform has been one of the dominant reform movements of the past 20 years. While originally performed by a small number of design teams, the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform has begun to spread among state education agencies, districts, commercial publishers, and others as they collaborate to integrate curriculum, assessment, and professional development into coherent programs of improvement for schools. The study has two goals. The first is to develop a conceptual framework characterizing the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform. The second is to use that framework to explore the work of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF). Between 1988-2000, SFAF rose to unusual prominence for its success designing and managing comprehensive school reform. Between 2001-2005, concurrent with the passage and implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, SFAF fell into decline, its continued viability in question. This study uses a conceptual framework developed around the ideas of managing interdependence and full world design to explore the work of SFAF between 1998-2005 in order to understand its rise to prominence and its subsequent decline. Drawing from the case of SFAF, I argue that we are just now beginning to understand the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform as a critical component of broader, systemic reform. I argue that our nascent understanding bears on evaluation of the progress of comprehensive school reform, the prospects of popularizing the work among institutionalized organizations, and the implications for networked charter schools as an alternative to comprehensive school reform.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationEducation historyEducational administrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125474/2/3192752.pd
Peabody Journal of Education, 2020
Review of Educational Research, 2020
A group of collaborative approaches to education research sits uneasily within the existing infra... more A group of collaborative approaches to education research sits uneasily within the existing infrastructure for research and development in the United States. The researchers in this group hold themselves to account to ways of working with schools, families, and communities that are different from the ways envisioned by models for education research promoted in U.S. policies and endorsed by U.S. federal agencies. Those models, widely supported by funders, privilege the research priorities of individual investigators and regularly yield products and findings with little relevance to educational practice. In this article, we review four collaborative approaches: Community-based Design Research, Design-based Implementation Research, Improvement Science in Networked Improvement Communities, and the Strategic Education Research Partnership. Through a participatory process involving developers and advocates for these approaches, we identified a set of interconnected principles related to c...
Handbook of Research on Online Discussion-Based Teaching Methods, 2020
MOOC designers seeking to address evolving ambitions of MOOCs to support workforce development co... more MOOC designers seeking to address evolving ambitions of MOOCs to support workforce development confront a fundamental design dilemma: on the one hand, the self-paced nature of online learning is efficient for busy learners working alone to acquire new knowledge and capabilities; on the other hand, the self-paced, often-isolated nature of online learning complicates designing MOOCs that motivate and sustain the type of engagement necessary to support learners in mobilizing new knowledge and capabilities in practice contexts and in collaboration with other professionals. The authors offer an account of their efforts to create opportunities for deep learning in large-scale, open-access learning environments through the creation and instantiation of a new instructional model called self-directed/community-supported learning. This model aims to draw diverse learners around the world into a community of discourse and practice through coordinated video content presentations, web-based enri...
Education, 2020
The purpose of this contribution to Oxford Bibliographies in Education is to establish context fo... more The purpose of this contribution to Oxford Bibliographies in Education is to establish context for the series of articles on improvement-focused educational research, a developing field aimed at producing and using knowledge to address problems, needs, and opportunities grounded deeply in practice contexts. This article frames the policy context of educational innovation and improvement in the United States from which improvement-focused educational research has emerged and in which it is currently developing. We conceptualize “policy” broadly as initiatives and movements that aim to drive the agenda for (and pursuit of) educational innovation as advanced both (a) within and by branches and agencies of government and (b) outside of government, by philanthropies, non-profit organizations, associations, and interest groups. We focus specifically on federal and national policy initiatives since the 1950s that have shared the central priorities of improvement-focused educational researc...
Educational Policy, 2019
The institutional environment of U.S. school systems has changed considerably over a quarter cent... more The institutional environment of U.S. school systems has changed considerably over a quarter century as standards and test-based accountability became central ideas in policy texts and discourses about improving education. We explore how U.S. school systems are managing in this changed environment by focusing on system leaders’ sense-making about their environments as they attempt to build educational systems to improve instruction, the core technology of schooling. We identify the policy texts and discourses system leaders notice and their framings, interpretations, and uses of these cues as they build educational infrastructures to support more coherent instructional visions. We argue that school systems’ educational infrastructure building efforts were intended at coupling their systems’ formal organization with particular environmental cues in an effort to influence classroom instruction. In turn, we argue that these educational infrastructure building efforts can simultaneously...
Educational Policy, 2019
A sustained policy press to improve quality and reduce disparities in public education is driving... more A sustained policy press to improve quality and reduce disparities in public education is driving U.S. public school districts to organize and manage instruction for excellence and equity. The purpose of this analysis is to elaborate and to animate patterns and dilemmas in this work. The analysis identifies five domains of work central to this transformation, four patterns in the distribution of this work among central offices and schools, and four dilemmas endemic to the work. It then uses the preceding to frame vignettes of that work and those dilemmas as playing out in four different public school districts.
Educational Policy, 2019
Institutional theory, an important research tradition in analysis of schooling, has examined the ... more Institutional theory, an important research tradition in analysis of schooling, has examined the development of mass schooling in the United States and worldwide. But research in this tradition has given little attention to the internal working of mass school systems, to problems of inequality and the quality of instruction, or to relating those problems to the organization and management of mass school systems. Building on the first three articles, which document how education system building has become a key instrument in efforts to improve the quality and equality of educational opportunity for students, we argue for a program of comparative research on education system building cross-nationally. We outline a program of research that would extend our comparative approach to studying school systems’ efforts to build, use and manage educational infrastructure as they attempt to transition to education systems in the United States by including such efforts in several other nations.
Journal of Educational Administration, 2019
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships among governmental organizations, n... more Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine relationships among governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations and the organization and management of instruction in US public education, with the aim of raising issues for cross-national research among countries in which the involvement of non-governmental organizations is increasing. Design/methodology/approach The paper is structured in four parts: an historical analysis of the architecture and dynamics of US public education; an analysis of contemporary reform efforts seeking to improve quality and reduce inequities; an analysis of ways that legacy and reform dynamics manifest in two US public school districts; and a discussion of considerations for cross-national research. Findings In US public education, dependence on non-governmental organizations for instructional resources and services is anchored in deeply institutionalized social, political and economic values dating to the country’s founding and that continu...
Review of Research in Education, 2019
In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the ... more In the early 1990s, the logic and policies of systemic reform launched a press to coordinate the pursuit of excellence and equity in U.S. public education, with each other and with classroom instruction. There was little in that policy moment to predict that these reforms would sustain, and much to predict otherwise. Yet, nearly three decades hence, many public school districts are working earnestly to pursue the central aims of the reforms: all students engaging rich instructional experiences to master ambitious content and tasks at the same high standards. That begs a question: What happens when new educational ambitions collide with legacy educational institutions—not in a policy moment but across a historical moment? This chapter takes up that question by reviewing the rise of mass public schooling in pursuit of universal access, a historic pivot toward instructionally focused education systems in pursuit of excellence and equity, and changing patterns in instructional organizat...
Educational Researcher, 2017
The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied... more The environment of U.S. schools has changed dramatically over a quarter century as standards tied to test-based accountability and market competition became commonplace. We examine the issues that school systems face in this changing environment, to identify considerations for researchers interested in reform as educational system building. We highlight a central dilemma: Systems manage environmental pressures to become more coherent enterprises that focus on tested outcomes while managing the inherited differentiated organizations and environmental pressures which support these enterprises. We identify four activity domains that are defined by these competing pressure: consensus on outcomes; infrastructure to connect outcomes with instruction; recruitment that is aligned with outcomes; and competing environmental pressures.
Educational Researcher, 2016
In late 2015, the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act strengthened federal commitment to th... more In late 2015, the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act strengthened federal commitment to the use of evidence in educational innovation, focusing squarely on increasing the impact of innovation on educational outcomes. Concurrently, articles published in Educational Researcher examined new potential to increase the success of educational innovation through researcher-practitioner collaboration, focusing squarely on continuous improvement grounded in problems of practice. This essay examines how impact and improvement play out in the leadership of network-based improvement initiatives. Integrating critical scholarship with analysis of 20 i3-funded networks, the argument is that the practical challenges of network leaders vary inversely with system-level innovation infrastructure, which currently provides strong support for evaluating impact but weak support for continuous improvement. Thus, additional potential to increase the success of educational innovation is argued to lie i...
Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk (JESPAR), 2016
ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on Reading Recovery situates the enterprise in a ... more ABSTRACT This introduction to the special issue on Reading Recovery situates the enterprise in a broader educational reform context that has placed a priority on developing and fielding large-scale, systemic interventions that support ambitious instructional practice and student outcomes. Within this context, Reading Recovery is examined as an evolving, adaptive epistemic community in which tutors, teachers, leaders, coaches, and developers collaborate to produce, use, and refine the practical knowledge needed to support and sustain success among large numbers of struggling readers. Viewing Reading Recovery as an epistemic community provides a framework for more deeply engaging the articles in this special issue, for reflecting on Reading Recovery's history of success, and for speculating about Reading Recovery's future in rapidly evolving policy and reform contexts.