Implications for Research Our work in these states and school districts suggests questions to be addressed in further research. Their premise was that difficult changes are unlikely to be sustained without substantial peer support.
Systemic reform is hard work.
Additional research is needed to understand what motivates teachers to invest themselves in this work. But, because we chose schools for their involvement in education reform, these teachers, and the schools in which they work, are not representative of the general population of educators and schools. For policy makers, it is important to understand the incentives and disincentives in the educational system. Our work also points up questions to be addressed in further research on capacity building in the context of systemic reform. As we have noted earlier, capacity building should be thought of in organizational, as well as, individual terms.