Although scholars have proposed school climate as a key mediator through which school-based management (SBM) can improve educational outcomes, empirical evidence on the relationship between SBM and school climate improvement is sparse. In this article, we use three waves of Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data across 57…

School autonomy has been and continues to be one of the most important education reform strategies around the world despite ambiguity about its theoretical and empirical effects on students learning. We use international data from PISA to test three country-level factors that might account for inconsistent results in prior literature: (1) the…

Purpose: Principal instructional leadership and teacher participation in decision-making are conceptualized as shared instructional leadership (SIL) -- a management philosophy that positively impacts student academic performance. However, the statistically meaningful relationship between SIL and student performance remains controversial as SIL…

Turkey's politically induced 'curricular modernization initiative' intended a philosophical change and a system-level transformation from behaviouristic to constructivist-inspired pedagogies in the early 2000s. Science curriculum has been one of the curricula that has taken precedence. It has changed four times since then. The latest science…

This article aims to point out how school autonomy helps principals reach higher quality by increasing flexibility in three areas: pedagogy, organization and management. Autonomy leads to an improvement in student performance and, consequently, in educational quality. A theoretical framework based on literature review and PISA results is followed…

The aim of this study was to demonstrate the opinions of teacher candidates, who were born after 2000 and called Generation Z, about the concept of school autonomy. This quantitative research was conducted according to the descriptive survey model. The data obtained is based on the responses given by teacher candidates to the "School…

Improving the quality of education is a permanent concern for national policymakers. In that regard, a growing number of education systems have implemented a monitoring system where pupils have to take standardised tests at regular intervals during their school career (OECD, 2013). This article aims to offer food for thought to the readers of…

What are crucial determinants of a country's average educational performance? Using data from the OECD PISA 2012 study on 58 countries, we develop a typology of educational regimes based on marketisation in terms of school autonomy and accountability. Following organisational theories, we expect that school autonomy is an ideal condition for…

The Republic of Ireland has a history of high reading scores in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Analysis from PISA 2018 shows that although the country has many cultural similarities to the four UK nations (England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), 15-year-old pupils in the Republic of Ireland achieved…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework for reconceptualising research on school autonomy to redress the limitations of traditional research, strengthen the conceptual links between school autonomy and learning outcomes and offer a range of new strategies for studying the interplay of school autonomy, leadership and learning.…

Purpose: The three neighbouring nations of Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore participated in the 2009, 2012 and 2015 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) cycles. Despite many similarities between the three nations, Singapore has consistently been a top PISA performer, with Malaysia and Indonesia in the bottom third of the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to measure the efficiency performance of public sector-funded schools in Spain. Design/methodology/approach: Using school-level data from Program for International Student Assessment 2012, cross-sectional models were estimated using stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). Technical efficiencies of public…

This article demonstrates how meta-analytic techniques, that have typically been used to synthesize findings across numerous studies, can also be applied to examine the reasons why relationships between background characteristics and outcomes may vary across different locations in a single multi-site survey. This application is particularly…

This study examined and compared school autonomy in China and the United States. Based on the international PISA 2012 school data, the authors examined three aspects of school autonomy. We found that in comparison with the United States, (1) principals from China were less likely to have responsibility over eleven school decisions (hiring…

Since the mid-1980s, a number of East Asian societies have consistently performed well in international tests, and their education systems have emerged as models of "best practice", including Hong Kong, which has been extensively referenced by politicians and their advisers in England. In parallel, local dissatisfaction with the…