Explore the vast range of titles available.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical comparison of two measures of school success - a value-added assessment system and the federally-mandated system of adequate yearly progress (AYP) - to identify highly effective urban schools in the USA and to explore the predictive relationship between evidence-based decision-making and school improvement.Design methodology approach - A total of 204 urban schools with 6,684 teachers and 149,665 students in grades 1 through 10 participated in the study. Data included teacher survey and students' standardized reading and math scores from 2002 through 2005. Analyses included factor analysis, growth modeling, and multiple logistic regression analyses.Findings - AYP status was strongly predicted by student and school demographics rather than by organizational climate and instructional practices. In contrast, school growth as measured by the district's value-added assessment system was unrelated to the demographics of the student population and related strongly to specific school practices. Specifically, high growth schools exhibited strong evidence-based decision-making practice where teachers used the district's benchmark assessment to reflect on instructional practice, used the core curriculum to guide instruction, and received frequent and high quality professional development on reading and math instruction.Practical implications - As states gravitate away from relying on AYP status as a measure of school success, districts will benefit from integrating measures of growth and using school data management systems that integrate benchmark assessment capabilities and provide teachers with the training and tools needed to use the information in their daily practice.Originality value - This study provides a direct comparison of evaluation models using a variety of current methods within a single district that has played a central and highly-visible role in the education reform movement in the USA.

Research concerning family preferences for schooling indicates that they value proximity to home as much as academic quality when choosing schools. However, preferences for proximity likely represent inability to access schools farther away from home, especially for disadvantaged students. I test whether distance and district boundaries constrain access to high-performing and effective schools for Detroit students where families choose between intradistrict, interdistrict, and charter schools, as well as an assigned school. I employ a unique data set that includes enrollment records, addresses, and commute times for Detroit residents regardless of where they attend school. Results show that disadvantaged students have little access to the highest quality schools available, specifically those outside Detroit. However, students attend higher performing schools within Detroit.

How educators and policy makers define good schools drives their decisions about how to organize their schools and assess their success. In this monthly column, Teresa Preston explores Kappan authors’ different visions of what good schools look like and how to measure school success. Authors have considered how best to educate students with different needs and abilities, the varying priorities of stakeholders, and the desire to hold schools accountable.

This study proposes an empirically grounded theory of how school reform implementation relates to effectiveness, useful for developing and studying many approaches to school reform both in the U.S. and abroad, and also for assessing how policymakers and implementers might leverage various aspects of implementation to create effective school improvement models at scale. Guided by a new framework that links Bryk and colleagues’ (2010) five essential supports and as reported by Desimone’s (2002) adaptation of Porter and colleagues’ (1986) policy attributes theory, we use a mixed-methods approach to study the implementation and effectiveness of school turnaround efforts in the School District of Philadelphia. We explore the relationships among key turnaround model components, approaches to model implementation, and academic achievement using a matched comparison design and estimating a series of regressions. Qualitative methods are used to contextualize findings and offer explanatory hypotheses.

This paper aims to provide a systematic review of the literature on school effectiveness, with a focus on identifying the main factors that contribute to successful educational outcomes. The research question that this paper aimed to address is “what are the main factors of school effectiveness?”. We were interested in several descriptors such as school, effectiveness/efficiency theories, effectiveness/efficiency research and factors. Studies (published within the 2016–2022 period) were retrieved through two databases: JSTOR and ERIC. This paper defines several categories identified by school effectiveness research. Within these categories, various factors that affect the students’ outcomes and the defined effectiveness in school are listed. As the results show, the issue of school effectiveness is multifaceted, as the effectiveness of schools is a complex concept that can be measured through various indicators such as academic achievement, student engagement and teacher satisfaction. The review of school effectiveness revealed that several factors contribute to effective schools, such as strong leadership, effective teaching practices, a positive school culture and parental involvement. Additionally, school resources, such as funding and facilities, can impact school effectiveness, particularly in under-resourced communities.

The principle of schools collaborating to improve is one that has seen growing interest in recent years, and there is emerging evidence that in particular collaboration between high and lower performing schools can be an effective school improvement method. However, this evidence relates primarily to secondary schools, and little research has been conducted on the factors that could make collaboration more or less effective. In this study we specifically looked at partnerships between low and high performing primary schools, in which high performing schools acted as supporters to low performing partner schools. A mixed methods approach was used. A quasi-experimental quantitative study was conducted to ascertain the relationship between partnership and pupil attainment using data from the National Pupil Database. This was followed up by case studies of nine partnerships. Findings showed that there was a positive relationship between partnership and pupil attainment at Key Stage 2, and that successful partnerships were characterised by intensive interventions focused on teaching and learning and leadership.

Over the decades, dozens of Kappan authors have offered their own perspectives on what a high-quality school looks like. And as they've demonstrated, how we define good schooling affects everything from our funding decisions and school reform priorities to the ways in which we prepare our teachers, design the curriculum, teach our classes, assess our students, and evaluate our schools. US public schools have a responsibility to educate enormous numbers of students, who come from a very wide range of backgrounds. In a report to the trustees of Teachers College, Columbia University, published in the February 1929 Kappan, William Russell, then dean of the college, argued that this created a tension between the quantity of students our schools seek to educate and the quality of the education schools provide. By the second half of the 20th century, most articles about school quality revolved around academics. But even then, authors disagreed as to what a good academic education entailed and how it should be evaluated.

School ethos refers to the school leadership’s purposive efforts to shape and direct the attitudes, values and behaviors needed in order to promote an active learning environment and to prevent the emergence of undesirable behaviors by creating shared meaning and common goals for the school. The aim of this study was to examine how teacher rated aspects of school ethos are linked with manifestations of bullying among 11th grade students. Five teacher-rated sub-dimensions of school ethos (staff stability, teacher morale, structure-order, student focus, and academic atmosphere) were examined in relation to student-reported perpetration of and exposure to traditional school bullying and cyberbullying. The data material combines student and teacher information from two separate data collections performed in 2016, comprising teachers and students in 58 upper secondary schools in Stockholm. Analyses showed that bullying was associated with all but one of the five sub-dimensions of school ethos, namely structure and order for dealing with bullying behaviors at the school. Results are discussed in light of this counter-intuitive finding. Our findings nevertheless lend support to the idea that the social organization of schools, as reflected in their teacher-rated ethos, can affect individual students’ attitudes in a way that prevents the emergence of bullying behavior among students.

School effectiveness research (SER) and bi/multilingual education research have been largely developed as separate research paradigms. Hence, SER research does not facilitate clear conclusions on bi/multilingual (the term ‘multilingual’ is used henceforth) education and its effectiveness. Despite the intensification of multilingual education research over the last four decades, only a few authors and studies have focused on offering a compact overview of what factors need to be in place for the programs to be effective. These works are neither recent nor systematic. In this article, we aim to contribute to this research gap by systematically reviewing the research evidence on specific factors explaining multilingual student success in multilingual education programs. The findings of this systematic literature review integrate the current evidence regarding the critical factors conducive to student success in multilingual education. The results reveal that the reviewed studies mostly discussed school level factors and only occasionally talked about state/regional or individual level factors. We also underscore the critical role of leadership in making multilingual education successful. The implications of this review are twofold: by using a conceptual framework to discuss the success factors, the interdependence of the variables shaping multilingual education is highlighted, while the results collect the latest evidence for decision makers in multilingual education.

In this paper, we present the findings of a qualitative study conducted in 2018 in five schools (three primary and two secondary schools) in a rural community in the south of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (SA). It adopted a case study methodology and explored principals’ understandings and practices of servant leadership (SL), which is assumed to be part of principals’ leadership approaches. A review of literature suggested a dearth of empirical studies in this area in SA despite its importance. The findings indicate that close to three decades since SA became a democratic country, research suggests that the notion and values of putting people first has not taken root. The findings also suggest that principals have a limited understanding of the concept of accountability as an inextricable component of SL. Consequently, accountability to external bodies is prioritized.