The heart and soul of any successful organization is outstanding leadership. In education, school divisions are always striving to increase school achievement and as such hold school leaders accountable for this growth. Leaders require explicit leadership skills. This article shares a proposal in which school leaders participate in direct literacy…

This chapter describes a model for continuous improvement that guides the work of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, or NCSU. NCSU is a research and development center funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the research arm of the United States Department of Education. At the core of the Center's work is an innovative…

The political and social rationale for the establishment of a national system of education in nineteenth-century Ireland has been the focus of considerable attention by scholars. Less attention has, however, been paid to teacher quality and school effectiveness within that system. Various efforts were made over the course of the century to address…

This article emphasizes the urgent demand for measurements of university internationalization and proposes a new approach to develop a set of internationally applicable indicators for measuring university internationalization performance. The article looks into existing instruments developed for assessing university internationalization,…

This paper argues that the dynamic model of educational effectiveness can be used to establish stronger links between educational effectiveness research (EER) and school improvement. It provides research evidence to support the validity of the model. Thus, the importance of using the dynamic model to establish an evidence-based and theory-driven…

This article reviews findings from the authors' studies of recovery high schools (RHS), including a 1995 program evaluation of a school in New Mexico (Moberg & Thaler, 1995), a 2006-09 descriptive study of 17 recovery high schools (Moberg & Finch, 2008), and presents early findings from a current study of the effectiveness of recovery high…

This article reports on a first cycle of a larger action research study conducted to determine how Circuit Teams could support School Management Teams of underperforming high schools towards whole-school development. Although it is a mandated requirement by the Department of Education, none of the four schools involved in the study had developed a…

The focus of this paper is on detailing the decisions made when we created, implemented and studied a mathematics professional development (PD) program in low-performing, urban schools. Our program held many characteristics espoused by researchers as critical for effectiveness. We begin by reviewing the characteristics of quality PD programs that…

This descriptive study investigates the development of a district leadership coaching program. Specifically, the study examines the creation of a coaching program for elementary principals, the first six months of monthly meetings between the coaches and district leaders, and the perceived utility of the meetings by the district coaches.…

Bethpage Union Free School District in New York is a high-performing district by almost any current accountability measure. Yet administrators and teachers worried that they were not doing enough to prepare their students as critical thinkers for the 21st century. Inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the…

This article examines school leadership in the context of Taiwanese educational reform since the mid-1990s. The goal of the inquiry is twofold: to explore the conflicts that school administrators have confronted in facilitating school reform and to analyze the strategic and innovative leadership practices that have facilitated improvements in…

An overview of the first five years of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study is presented. Major findings from Phase II are offered. School, local, and state recommendations are made. (Author/MT)

When a survey of students at Eisenhower Middle School in Everett, Washington indicated that they spent a good part of the school day feeling tired and hungry, that they felt unsafe in some areas of the school, and that worn-down facilities left many of them feeling depressed, the author and his staff concluded that, in order to improve the…

Background: There has been much educational verbosity over the past decade related to building capacity for effective schools. However, there seems to be a scarcity of clarification about what is meant by school capacity building or how to accomplish and sustain this process. This article describes the preexisting conditions and ongoing processes…

The Effective Teaching and Supervision of Instruction program developed at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay is described. This program is based on Madeline Hunter's clinical theory of instruction. (MT)