This toolkit informs school leaders about the authorizing challenges they may confront, illustrates opportunities and options for school leaders to navigate the authorizing process, and shares useful frameworks for considering the benefits and trade-offs of these options. The toolkit contains the following sections: (1) Strategies &…

Last fall, researchers at Bellwether Education Partners began research on how standard authorizing practices could discourage or disadvantage charter schools with nontraditional models, such as dual language immersion, Montessori, and competency-based education models. Throughout the course of their research, the authors spoke to dozens of school…

In this paper the author introduces a very practical model to guide school leaders/managers into supporting parental involvement and engagement in their schools. The model is called the Dual Navigation Approach (DNA). This rubric is based on six meta-analyses that he conducted over the last fifteen years. What is presented therefore is a…

This new edition of Successful School Leadership brings in the latest evidence and material to what has remained a popular publication. While the fundamentals of what drives successful school leadership remain the same, new evidence further supports the arguments put forward by Christopher Day and Pam Sammons back in 2016. The growing interest in…

The world needs great individual educational changemakers capable of identifying problems and creating bold, scalable solutions. But the world also needs Dream Teams--groups of talented administrators, teachers, staff, students, and community members who are passionate about making things better for kids, believe that school-based change is the…

Working with partners including the Department of Education at Oxford University, the Centre for Equity in Education at the University of Manchester, the University of Glasgow, the University of Nottingham and the Hong Kong Institute of Education, "Education Development Trust" has commissioned a series of reviews of international…

The quality of leadership and the effectiveness of schools to deliver an appropriate education through quality teaching have been "hot" topics within education and more widely for several decades. This article provides a brief historical overview of developments in research and changing paradigms of Australian school leadership, followed…

In their second collaboration, Wilcox and Angelis tell the stories of high school educators who embody best practices in their day-to-day activities--practices that consistently lead to higher student academic achievement across the core subjects for "all" students. This book shares results of a multi-case study of how some high schools…

What fundamental ideas from higher performing schools underlie a coherent approach to educational improvement? First, only a system-wide approach to improving teaching and learning can make it possible for students to receive good teaching, year after year, across different subjects. Given the difficulty of the task, isolated and uncoordinated…

Research on effective schools is limited by the same weaknesses that hamper research on effective organizations. Examining two competing frameworks for studying organizational effectiveness, this report proposes a general model of school effectiveness. The model was enacted and studied in one school and was found to be effective. Includes two…

Included in this year's U.S. Department of Education appropriations was a $150 million Comprehensive School Reform Initiative that will send at least $50,000 to each school that wants to use a reform model based on reliable research and effective practices. Comprehensive reform improves the entire school, from curriculum and instruction to parent…

To explore the principal's role as instructional leader in school improvement strategies, this research brief focuses on characteristics of effective schools, a profile of effective principals, and a discussion with Dr. Steven Bossert, Associate Laboratory Director for Research and Development at Far West Laboratory in San Francisco, California,…

This paper is designed to help educational leaders improve their decision making strategies (and correspondingly educational practice) by evaluating their own strategy in concert with a model proposed in the paper. The proposed model provides educational leaders with an enhanced context within which one can effectively analyze and evaluate…

In the early 1970s, pessimism about public education in the United States was on the rise. To counter this outlook, researchers held a conference to identify public schools that were humane, caring, and effective, and from this conference arose a heightened awareness of alternative schools and their place in education. Subsequent years of…

Changing student demographics, legislation improving standards and access, and increasing community expectations are creating instability in the nation's education system. Also, public confidence in schools' effectiveness has eroded. This treatise draws on sociology, corporate studies, and effective schools research to understand how education…