School accountability is subject to considerable scrutiny. It generates sharp political debate, policy challenges, and continuous discussion. Growth models are now a part of that discussion. To many practitioners the sheer volume of "important to know" information is daunting. The members of the Technical Issues in Large Scale Assessment…

Walk into any school in America and you will see adults who care deeply about their students and are doing the best they can every day to help students learn. But you will also see a high degree of variability among classrooms--much higher than in most other industrialized countries. Today we are asking schools to do something they have never done…

Hurricane Katrina set the stage for a transformation of public education in New Orleans, replacing the city's existing school system with a decentralized choice-based system of both charter and district-run schools. Using principal, teacher, and parent surveys administered three years after Katrina, this study examined schools' governance and…

The key to success in today's competitive environment is meeting the needs of key stakeholders who may have competing interests. Community colleges must meet the challenge to deliver value and to measure performance in ways that are meaningful to different groups. Forward-looking institutions are investing in assessment and capitalizing on its…

Addressing the Pittsburgh public school system's need for staff evaluation, Pittsburgh's Research-Based Instructional Supervisory Model (PRISM) is an adaptation of Madeline Hunter's materials on effective teaching and Theodore Forte's synthesis of Hunter's materials in his "Workshop on Instructional Skills." While total PRISM…

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,…

The Department of Education's Secondary School Recognition Program (SSRP) was developed to identify and recognize unusually effective public secondary schools and, through publicity and other means, encourage the emulation of their successful programs, policies, and practices by practitioners in other schools. This directory describes a small…

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…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of the Schoolwide Enrichment Model (SEM), a system intended to nurture behavioral giftedness without reliance on gifted identification procedures. The study found SEM positively influenced the attitudes of elementary school students (n=1,935) in six middle class schools. SEM may provide schoolwide benefits…

In fall 1984, the Jefferson Parish (Louisiana) School Board established a Principals' Instructional Leadership Development Project to focus on the correlates of effective schools and develop a project designed to improve principals' leadership characteristics. This paper describes the two-year project, which developed a model emphasizing…

Despite the proliferation of school improvement projects and school effectiveness research during the 1980s, there have been very few methodologically rigorous, large-scale, widely published school effectiveness studies. As a result, the research base is thin and needs to be updated. This paper presents a brief history of the Louisiana School…

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…