Purpose: This article illustrates how successful leaders combine the too often dichotomized practices of transformational and instructional leadership in different ways across different phases of their schools' development in order to progressively shape and "layer" the improvement culture in improving students' outcomes. Research…

This paper investigates how key elements of school culture are associated with teachers' capacity to find and act on new information. We analyzed survey data from 3,579 teachers located in 117 schools which were a randomly selected sample from 9 states in the US. We found that school cultural components such as academic press, student support, and…

This study aims at establishing whether primary schools in the Saudi education system conform to the characteristics of what are referred to as "good schools" in the British education system. The findings established through this study show that only 43.75% of primary schools in Saudi conform to the characteristics of what are referred…

Visionary leaders shape their actions and initiate transformation to reach a specific goal. To do so is critically important in South Africa, where the education system offers limited opportunities to manage a school in a manner that deviates from the prescribed norm. School leaders typically encounter barriers such as the inadequacy of the…

Bully victimization is associated with lower academic performance for individual students; however, less is known about the impact of bullying on the academic performance of the school as a whole. This study examined how retrospective administrator reports of both the prevalence of teasing and bullying (PTB) and the use of evidence-based bullying…

Despite growing interest in the importance of nonacademic skills for student success, very few studies have examined the extent to which schools and teachers are associated with gains in these outcomes. This descriptive study adds to the nascent literature by examining the amount of school- and teacher-associated variation in kindergarten…

Students need a safe and supportive school environment to maximize their academic and social-emotional learning potential. A school's discipline policies and practices directly impact school climate and student achievement. Together, discipline policies and positive school climate efforts can reinforce behavioral expectations and ensure student…

In 2011, the USAID Education Strategy set forth an ambitious agenda to help solve one of the most pressing challenges facing developing countries: the lack of access to quality education for children and youth. Through this strategy, with a focus on measurable outcomes and ambitious targets, USAID transformed the conversation in the sector from…

In this study, the researcher obtained three years of school-level state testing data from 1,467 Title I elementary schools in the state of Tennessee and analyzed the averages in context of teachers' responses on a state-wide TELL survey. The researcher wanted to see if teachers who taught in low-performing schools perceived the absolute and…

CareerTech VISION 2012, a groundbreaking and visionary education event, was held in Atlanta, Georgia, November 28-December 1. More than 3,000 people converged on the Georgia World Congress Center to learn from their colleagues and to hear from leaders in business and industry. This year's event was organized around seven key themes representing…

This article tells the story of MetLife Foundation-NASSP Breakthrough Schools. The program's goals are to identify, recognize, and showcase the leadership and successful practices of middle level and high schools that serve large numbers of students living in poverty and that have high levels of student achievement or show evidence of dramatically…

The study sought to explore the type of skills needed by government secondary school heads in order for them to be effective. Hence, the study examined whether school heads could be effective if they employed either leadership skills, management skills or if they employed both skills. The main purpose of the study was to establish how any of the…

Research on school reform and implementation has found that past efforts to scale up interventions in schools often results in little change in the core work of teaching and learning (Elmore, 1996). That is, there are often few changes in the work students do with teachers. Thus it is important for researchers and school reformers to know how…

This case study explored the nature of the communication process within the governance system in a community college and illustrated the ways that this process, , supported the fulfillment of the mission of the institution. Guided by systems theory, this study examined how governance system relationships contributed to institutional communication…

Many school accountability programs are built on the premise that the sanctions attached to failure will produce higher future student achievement. Furthermore, such programs often include subgroup achievement rules that attempt to hold schools accountable for the performance of all demographic classes of students. This paper looks at two issues:…