This paper is an introduction to the field and to the case studies past and present. It describes the ten cases from parts of the world, notably Africa and Latin America, that constitute the overall work.We present cases that help us understand the realities of implementing reforms. Looking across the literature about education reforms over the last forty years we do not see a lot of material that addresses how education reform is enacted at the system level. We do see a lot of attention paid to the motivations driving reforms and the ideologies shaping the way reforms are presented.There was little attention paid to motivating professionals to adopt different practices or to afford some activities more time and importance in schools. Nor was there much attention paid to what social support measures were needed to ensure that students were ready to learn and that schools could focus primarily on student learning. Our aim is to avoid offering “magic bullets” like instructional alignment (Cohen, 1987), school choice (Chubb & Moe, 1990) competency-based education (Musiimenta,2023) or any piece of technology just released. As many have pointed out, like Larry Cuban (2010), ready-made, quick solutions do not sit well with the realities of schools where there are multiple actors, multiple purposes and long-time horizons. The Paradox of Rationality and Responsiveness is discussed as a major themes. Collectively the cases here and in the earlier volume point to the virtues and shortcomings of the wonderfully linear and stable models of policy formulation that shaped school reform ideas and strategies for the last forty years or more.

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