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How can good educational practice move beyond pockets of excellence to reach a much greater proportion of students and educators ? While many children and young adults in school districts and communities around the country have long benefited from the tremendous accomplishments of successful teachers, school, and programs, replicating this success on a larger scale has proven to be a difficult and vexing issue. In this article, Richard Elmore addresses this problem b y analyzing the role of school organization and incentive structures in thwarting large-scale adoption of innovative practices close to the "core" of educational practice. Elmore then reviews evidence from two attempts at large-scale school reform in the past-the progressive movement and the National Science Foundation curriculum reform projectsto evaluate his claims that ambitious large-scale school reform efforts, under current conditions, will be ineffective and transient. He concludes with four detailed recommendations for addressing the issue of scale in improving practice in education. The Problem of Scale in Educational Reform Why do good ideas about teaching and learning have so little impact on U.S. educational practice? This question, I argue, raises a central problem of U.S. education: A significant body of circumstantial evidence points to a deep, systemic incapacity of U.S. schools, and the practitioners who work in them, to develop, incorporate, and extend new ideas about teaching and learning in anything but a small fraction of schools and classrooms. This incapacity, I argue, is rooted primarily in the incentive structures in which teachers and administrators work. Therefore, solving the problem of scale means substantially changing these incentive structures.

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A major challenge for the next generation of policy research will be to apply the lessons of past implementation studies in building a more powerful conceptual framework and at the same time, in producing more useful information for policymakers. This article begins to build such a framework by focusing on the notion of alternative policy instruments, or the mechanisms that translate substantive policy goals into concrete actions. It examines four different types of instruments and attempts to specify key relationships among problem definition, instrument choice, organizational context, implementation, and effects.

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