Teacher effectiveness, which impacts student attainment even when controlling for student characteristics, is of key importance as a factor in educational effectiveness and improvement. Improving the quality of teaching is thus the primary means by which we can enhance student learning outcomes. Thus there has long been great interest in the…

An overview of the first five years of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study (LSES) is described. The longitudinal nature of the study has allowed the research team to develop an evolving methodology, one benefiting from prior external studies as well as prior phases of LSES. Practical implications and recommendations for future research are…

A major focus in Phase III of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study is on the relationship between classroom interaction patterns and school effectiveness. This paper presents observations on similarities and differences between prior teacher and school effectiveness studies, the LSES-III methodology, and preliminary results from one of the…

A major focus of the Louisiana School Effectiveness Study has been the search for characteristics of exemplary schooling in varied economic contexts. In this paper differential results of analyses of effective, typical, and ineffective schools in middle and low socioeconomic neighborhoods are presented. Implications for practitioners and for…

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific…

Much educational effectiveness research has been conducted over the past 40 years in developed countries, whereas few studies have focused on developing or newly industrialized countries such as the People's Republic of China. The case studies discussed in this article are part of a larger multiple-case, mixed-methods study that investigated 6…

The objective of this study was to advance our understanding of educational effectiveness processes within contexts where they have seldom been studied before: rural and urban areas in China. Utilizing a "contextually sensitive" school effectiveness research design, we collected classroom observation data to address our research…

Van Houtte (2005) called for clarification of the terms "school culture" and "school climate" and the role of each in school effectiveness research. This article presents a theoretical framework for school culture that asserts that it is a context-specific branch of organizational culture comprised of 4 dimensions and 3 levels. This…

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)

This article presents information on 2 international educational effectiveness studies, one completed and the other ongoing. The 2nd study is, to a large degree, a reaction to a methodological problem encountered in the 1st study, the lack of an internationally valid instrument measuring teacher effectiveness. This article presents 4 reasons for…

Differential results of analysis of effective, typical, and ineffective schools in middle and low socioeconomic neighborhoods are presented. Implications for practitioners and for future research are discussed. (Author/MT)

Now that the school effectiveness field is maturing, more refined and contextually sensitive observations about schools are possible. This paper focuses on socioeconomic status (SES) as one social context variable demonstrating substantial predictive power in numerous school improvement studies. Instead of viewing middle class behavior as superior…

Summarizes Louisiana's mandated school improvement program, discusses results, and describes how districts create effective or ineffective schools. Principals in ineffective schools defined their roles as limited, passive, and bureaucratic; principals in effective schools held multiple schooling goals and regarded the achievement process as…

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 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…