Several methods exist for assessing a person's scholarly and practical contributions. In the case of Jere Brophy, quantitative methods can begin to tell his remarkable story. Brophy authored or co-authored over 300 articles, monographs and books. His research has been cited over 36,000 times. Over 60 of his publications have been cited at least…

This chapter presents data from a 15-year, mixed-methods school improvement effort. The High Reliability Schools (HRS) reform made use of previous research on school effects and on High Reliability Organizations (HROs). HROs are organizations in various parts of our cultures that are required to operate successfully "the first time, every…

Over the last 4 decades, the school effectiveness and school improvement research bases have gained prominence and recognition on the international stage. In both a theoretical and empirical sense, they have matured through a wide range of well-documented projects, interventions, and innovations across a range of countries, describing how efforts…

If our schools were a research project, we'd say that while some aspects of our schools are highly valid, our overall academic systems aren't reliable. If educators are to meet the challenge of leaving no child behind, schools will have to improve with much greater reliability. In the mid-1990s, a group of British secondary schools decided to work…

Beginning from 1 high-poverty, historically low-achieving secondary school's successful turnaround work, this article provides data relative to a successful school turnaround, the importance of external and system-level supports, and the importance of building for sustainable institutionalization of improvements. The evidence suggests the…

Introduces the first issue in a two-part special urban education series on classroom-level issues related to teaching and change in urban contexts. The paper highlights schoolwide reform models that have been developed and widely implemented nationwide, demonstrating the vibrancy of urban school reform and the importance of teachers for providing…

Explores the reasons why this generation's educational reform period is lasting much longer than previous reform periods. Examines several promising programs for improving students' learning. Argues for valid teaching methods and programs and for highly reliable implementation methods. In a high-reliability organization, schooling designed by…

United States has shown considerable development within the school effectiveness and improvement fields. U.S. effectiveness research is contextually sensitive, small in quantity, and increasingly conducted within a "mixed methods" tradition. There is progress in describing and analyzing teacher and school effects and devising…

In this comprehensive report, four distinct processes for reforming nine low-performing Title I schools in challenging high-poverty contexts are examined. These processes include: (1) a fundamentally grassroots, site-based model of reform; (2) locally mandated school reconstitution; (3) implementation of a proven national reform model, Success for…

This paper summarizes activities associated with school-improvement projects in 12 Louisiana School Effectiveness and Assistance Pilot Study (SEAP) Cohort One schools during school year 1997-98 and plans for future improvement activities in 1998-99. Faculty and administrators at each school were asked to revise their current school-improvement…

This paper describes a 3-year evaluation of Core Knowledge Sequence implementation in 12 schools nationwide. The Core Knowledge Sequence, a whole-school curricular reform model, provides a planned progression of specific topics to teach in language arts, history, geography, math, science, and fine arts for grades 4-6. The evaluation determined…

This special issue provides diverse data sets on a school-improvement initiative in Memphis, Tennessee. The effort seems unusually promising because of top-down district support for eight separate site-based reform designs, planners' reliance on New American Schools and other familiar designs, long-term data-collection opportunities, accessible…

At the 10th International Congress for School Effectiveness and School Improvement, participants noted progress in effectiveness research regarding development of outcome measures, size effects, measures of educational processes, and variables contributing to effectiveness. School-improvement research has focused on schools' status changes,…

This book describes the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study (LSES), a decade-long project that identified the characteristics of effective schools. Following the foreword by Larry Cuban, four chapters in part 1 outline the rationale and four-phase design of the LSES. Four chapters in part 2 present quantitative and qualitative findings from LSES…

Current theorizing in education, as in industry, is largely devoted to explaining trial-and-error, failure-tolerant, low-reliability organizations. This article examines changing societal demands on education and argues that effective responses to those demands require new and different organizational structures. Schools must abandon industrial…