This guidebook is designed to help the individual school faculty, staff, and administration create a school plan. Five features critical to a successful school-improvement plan include: support by research findings; a focus on student achievement; attention to issues of quality and equity; collaboration; and an ongoing and self-renewing process.…

A synthesis of research on unusually effective schools is presented in this monograph, with a focus on research conducted since 1985. Three major issues are addressed: (1) the viability of the effective school concept in contemporary school reform; (2) the correlation between recent research and basic findings; (3) and the congruency of school…

This guidebook offers strategies for creating a district context that is conducive to initiating and sustaining school improvement. Designed to provide resources for those working at school district level, the five stages of the school-improvement process are based on effective-schools research--organize, focus, analyze, develop, and…

This book shows how Deming's Total Quality Management (TQM) theory for organizational management can be integrated with the effective-schools literature. Part 1 compares the 14 principles of TQM with the tenets of effective-schools research. The second part develops a blueprint for creating the total quality effective school. The conceptual…

Over 25 years, the effective schools movement has contributed to a results-oriented focus on education, raising the following 3 policy questions: (1) what is worth knowing; (2) how do we know when students know it; and (3) who decides what should be known and how to assess it? (SLD)

Research studies that have focused on identifying the characteristics or correlates of elementary and secondary schools that are unusually effective are reviewed, concentrating on the "effective schools" movement. Research on effective schools supports the conclusion that they rank high on certain characteristics frequently referred to as…