The practice education is an important part of higher educational system and an important approach to cultivating applied innovative talents. This paper studies practice of teaching platform and practical teaching system for the research and practice based on the objective basis of applied innovative talents and the basic characteristics of the…

This paper considers the pupil intakes to Academies in England, and their attainment, based on a re-analysis of figures from the Annual Schools Census 1989-2012, the Department for Education School Performance Tables 2004-2012 and the National Pupil Database. It looks at the national picture, and the situation for Local Education Authorities, and…

Appreciative inquiry is a strategy which takes a positive approach to organizational development. It aims to identify good practice, design effective development plans, and ensure implementation. This article examines the potentials and limitations of using the appreciative inquiry in a mixed methods research design for developing school…

Crystal Bonds is Principal at The High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, New York, NY. During her three years as a new principal at one of New York City's eight specialized high schools, she found herself constantly wrestling with two challenges: (1) Maintaining the school's high academic standards; and (2) protecting the…

The current study examined the goal orientations that could be inferred from how teachers from six municipal schools in Chile described their understandings, emotions, and behaviors during their participation in the assessment phase of the School Management Quality Assurance System. Content analysis of focus group interview transcripts evidenced…

Educational policy-makers around the world are strongly committed to the notion of "scaling up". This can mean anything from encouraging more teachers to take up a pedagogical innovation, all the way through to system-wide efforts to implement "what works" across all schools. In this paper, I use Bourdieu's notions of…

The authors explored teachers' and principals' perceptions of the feedback report from the National Tests in Trinidad and Tobago and the extent to which they used the report in making curricular decisions to impact student learning. The sample comprised 133 primary school teachers (79 from low-performing and 54 from high-performing schools) and 10…

Schools and neighborhoods are thought to be two of the most important contextual influences on student academic outcomes. Drawing on a unique data set that permits simultaneous estimation of neighborhood and school contributions to student test score gains, we analyze the distributions of these contributions to consider the relative importance of…

This article shares the findings from a case study conducted to explore the leadership practices of Principals of the Government Elementary Colleges of Education across Pakistan. The study focused on how these Principals understood their roles and responsibilities in the context of the changing role of teacher education in Pakistan and in the…

The 2001 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) known as No Child Left Behind and more recent federal initiatives such as Race to the Top and the ESEA flexibility waiver have brought student growth to the forefront of education reform for assessing school and teacher effectiveness. This study examined growth…

For decades, researchers have studied teacher efficacy. In the past decade or so, however, collective teacher efficacy has been at the forefront of educational research as an extension of teacher self-efficacy. Educational researchers have been studying this construct to determine its impact on student achievement, teacher quality, and school…

"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) The Greening of Environmental Ed: Teachers Focus on Complexity, Evidence, and Letting Students Draw Their Own Conclusions (Lucy Hood); (2) Like Teacher,…

This paper re-considers the widespread use of value-added approaches to estimate school "effects", and shows the results to be very unstable over time. The paper uses as an example the contextualised value-added scores of all secondary schools in England. The study asks how many schools with at least 99% of their pupils included in the…

Apparently sophisticated school performance measures have been used to claim that giving schools autonomy from local government control improves pupil exam performance. This paper explores the extent to which inferring causality between autonomy and pupil achievement is reasonable given that pupils are not randomly assigned to schools and schools…

For more than 20 years school choice programs have provided parents opportunities to send their children to public or private schools more suited to their needs. Choice and competition in education benefits students. Today, 21 states and Washington, D.C., have school choice programs serving more than one million students. Impressively, nine out of…