This paper will examine existing conceptual and operational definitions of comprehensive education initiatives in the U.S. and their contextual, theoretical and philosophical foundations. From the synthesis, it will derive a series of logic models clarifying the explicit and implicit assumptions underlying the initiatives that suggest how they should ideally function when the goal is to achieve the targeted outcomes for students and schools. It will suggest how the logic models may be used to frame questions to guide future empirical research on comprehensive initiatives.
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