The research's aim is to assess the services offered by Greek public secondary education schools, with the intention of identifying any discrepancies between students' expectations and their perceptions of the final services provided. The gaps discovered indicate that the school's educational services are not meeting student expectations in the…

Improving school effectiveness is a priority for many countries. The Swedish instrument "Pedagogical and Social Climate in School" (PESOC) has been widely used for measurement of school improvement. Since pedagogical leadership is an important component of school effectiveness, this study aimed to describe the psychometric properties of…

Over the past 40 years, a variety of school improvement initiatives have been designed and implemented in low-performing schools across the country, mostly with disappointing results. One potential explanation for the poor track record is that school leaders have too often designed improvement strategies without taking the time to understand the…

School closure is relatively common in the United States. An analysis by the Urban Institute found that about 2% of public schools, on average, were closed each year between 2003 and 2013, and these closures were found in urban, suburban, and rural communities. A substantial number of public schools have been closed in Michigan, California, Ohio,…

The Every Student Succeeds Act grants states more authority over their accountability systems than did No Child Left Behind, but have they seized the opportunity to develop school ratings that are clearer and fairer than those in the past? This new analysis examines the plans submitted by all fifty states and the District of Columbia, and whether…

Significant emphasis is currently placed on STEM education as a vehicle to encourage American youth to enter science, technology, engineering, and math-related professions. Gifted students are a natural resource of future innovators for these fields; however gifted programs are largely overlooked for program support. Since 1973, the Virginia…

Two quantitative measures of school performance are currently used, the average points score (APS) at Key Stage 2 and value-added (VA), which measures the rate of academic improvement between Key Stage 1 and 2. These figures are used by parents and the Office for Standards in Education to make judgements and comparisons. However, simple…

Outcome-oriented evaluation of school effectiveness is often based on student test scores in certain critical examinations. This study provides another method of evaluation--value-added--which is based on student achievement progress. This paper introduces the method of estimating the value-added score of schools in multi-level models. Based on…

Statistical modeling of school effectiveness data was originally motivated by the dissatisfaction with the analysis of (school-leaving) examination results that took no account of the background of the students or regarded each school as an isolated unit of analysis. The application of multilevel analysis was generally regarded as a breakthrough,…

Two quasi-experimental methods--fixed effects (FE) and virtual control records (VCR)--were used to measure charter schooling in 14 states and two districts. The new VCR method uses all available observable charter student characteristics and prior performance to create a composite comparison record. A head-to-head comparison of the FE and VCR…

Since their inception, charter schools have been a lighting rod for controversy, with much of the debate revolving around their effectiveness in improving student achievement. Previous research has shown mixed results for student achievement; this could be the consequence of different policy environments or varying methodological approaches with…

Federal education policy will soon undergo a major revision, with significant consequences for the state's own policy and practices. This report seeks to help federal and state policymakers consider this restructuring and one of its core questions: How should schools and school districts be held accountable for the academic progress of their…

This paper reports the findings from two large-scale national online surveys carried out in 2009 and 2010, which explored the state of history teaching in English secondary schools. Large variation in provision was identified within comprehensive schools in response to national policy decisions and initiatives. Using the data from the surveys and…

Fixed effects models are often useful in longitudinal studies when the goal is to assess the impact of teacher or school characteristics on student learning. In this article, I introduce an alternative procedure: adaptive centering with random effects. I show that this procedure can replicate the fixed effects analysis while offering several…

The ability of school (or teacher) value-added models to provide unbiased estimates of school (or teacher) effects rests on a set of assumptions. In this article, we identify six assumptions that are required so that the estimands of such models are well defined and the models are able to recover the desired parameters from observable data. These…