Guest Editors' Introduction—Special Issue
The Integrated Reform Projects of The Center of Research on Education, Diversity, & Excellence (CREDE)
Amanda Datnow and Susan Yonezawa

This special issue is devoted to the Integrated Reform projects of the Center for Research on Education, Diversity & Excellence (CREDE). The mission of CREDE is to assist the nation's diverse students at risk of educational failure to achieve academic excellence. CREDE’s research and development efforts focus on issues critical to the education of linguistic and cultural minority students and those at risk due to factors of race, poverty, or geographic location. (Adapted from the CREDE Mission Statement. For more information about this Center, visit its web site at www.cal.org/crede).

CREDE, which began in 1996 and continues through 2001, is one of the national research and development centers funded by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the US Department of Education. CREDE ’s administrative hub, led by Professor Roland Tharp, is located the University of California, Santa Cruz. The 30 research projects of CREDE span the United States, and principal investigators are located in universities and organizations around the country.

CREDE is divided into five research programs, each with a different area of focus. The Integrated Reform Program of CREDE (Program 5) includes research projects that involve the enactment, or evaluation of major educational programs, each of which has the potential to impact policy at local, state, tribal, and national levels. This special issue includes articles on six of the eight Integrated Reform Projects.

This special issue departs from JESPAR’s usual format of communication features, case studies, research articles, and book reviews. Instead, this issue includes six research articles, most of which are qualitative. All of the articles report findings about research currently in progress, as all of the studies are longitudinal. While the findings reported herein might be regarded as preliminary, in fact, they represent cutting edge research on the education of ethnic and linguistic minority students.

This special issue begins with an article by Tharp and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz and in the Pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico, who are jointly engaged in a school reform effort in Zuni. Their article, "Seven More Mountains and a Map…" describes the obstacles to reform in Zuni and in Native American communities more generally, situating these findings in a sociohistorical context. The authors end the article with practical information about the conditions that might enable successful reform in Native communities. Employing a similar theoretical framework, the second article by Yamauchi, Ceppi, and Smith, documents the sociocultural influences on the development of the Papahana Kaiapuni program, an indigenous language immersion program in Hawaii. The authors draw upon interview data and historical documents to provide an interesting look at the development, implementation, and challenges involved in this program designed to revive Hawaiian language and culture.

The third article, by Ellen McIntyre and her colleagues at the University of Louisville, also draws on sociocultural theory to explore children’s development in nongraded primary programs in Kentucky. This article includes rich description and analyses of the experiences of teachers and students in four schools serving populations who are mostly poor and of Appalachian descent. The next article by Padron, Waxman, and Huang also focuses closely on classroom issues. In particular, the authors use classroom observation data to compare the classroom instruction and learning environments of resilient and non-resilient students in elementary schools serving predominantly Hispanic students. Their systematic analysis of the data shows significant differences between the experiences of resilient and non-resilient students, yielding important implications for classroom practice.

The final two articles in this special issue both investigate the "scaling up" of externally developed reform models through a sociological framework which views reform implementation as a conditional matrix. The article by Hubbard and Mehan discusses the development of the "AVID" untracking program in Kentucky, carefully illustrating the dynamic interplay among structural constraints, culture, and people’s actions that shape the implementation of the program. The article by Yonezawa and Datnow is a cross-case analysis of 13 multicultural, multilingual elementary schools each implementing one of six externally developed whole school designs (e.g., Comer, Roots and Wings, etc.). The authors analyze the ways in which the state, district, design teams, and schools interacted to support some reforms and weaken others.

Taken as a group, the articles in this special issue on the Integrated Reform projects of CREDE contribute important knowledge in areas in which there has historically been a void -- including the education of Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Appalachians, and the scaling up of school reform models. These articles address some of the most important issues involved in the education of the richly diverse student populations that comprise America’s urban, rural, and tribal schools.