The Indiana State Board of Education (ISBE) has not been shy about exercising its authority to intervene in chronically underperforming schools. Under the state's Public Law 221, the Indiana Board can mandate specific interventions for any school that has received six consecutive failing grades under the state's accountability system--up to a…

Policymakers and practitioners frequently use teacher surveys to inform decisions on school improvement efforts in low-achieving schools. There is little empirical evidence on how the results of these surveys relate to student outcomes. This study provides information on how perception data from a teacher survey in Idaho is correlated with three…

The purpose of this study was to identify the principal behaviors that would define an instructional leader as being a data-driven school administrator and to assess current school administrators' levels of being data-driven. This research attempted to examine the relationship between the degree to which a principal was data-driven and the…

Within the media and the literature the need is often expressed for the establishment of a culture of learning within South African schools. The contrasting view tends to be one of dysfunctional schools that have come into being, giving rise to significant learner behaviour problems and poor pass rates being encountered in practice. This paper is…

Performance measurement in the public sector is largely based on objective metrics, which may be subject to gaming behaviour. This paper investigates a novel subjective performance evaluation system where independent inspectors visit schools at very short notice, publicly disclose their findings and sanction schools rated fail. First, I…

Because results from TIMSS 2007 showed a gap in mathematics and science achievement between students in the United States and those in the top-performing countries, TIMSS 2007 data were used to investigate how school effectiveness factors known to be strongly associated with higher STEM achievement operated in the United States compared to Chinese…

Frank Reliford, the Principal at Dee-Mack Intermediate since 2005, is familiar to almost every child in the community. 260 Students attend Reliford's school, and their status is a point of pride: Dee-Mack Intermediate is consistently one of the highest performing schools in the state. The change in student performance correlates to the…

Purpose: This article presents the design and test of a measure of school leadership as an organizational quality through the interaction of principal and teacher instructional influence. The Organizational Leadership Model hypothesizes four distinct conditions of school leadership, and the analysis investigates the relationship between teacher,…

Over the last two decades, state education agencies (SEAs) have been given considerable responsibilities for improving low-performing schools and for adopting research-based practices in doing so. Yet we know little about how and where these organizations search for, select, and use research and other kinds of evidence. We examined these questions…

In this study, the authors connect 3 streams of literature to develop an instrument for measuring the degree to which principals engage in data-informed decision making on high-impact strategies that are empirically associated with higher student achievement. The 3 literature streams are (a) the importance of data-informed decision making, (b) the…

Why are some schools able to thrive and produce strong student outcomes, while others struggle? To answer this question, researchers have surveyed teachers and students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) since the 1990s, asking them about their schools' organizational climate and practices. From these data, researchers at the Consortium on Chicago…

This fifth annual "Boston Opportunity Agenda Report Card" provides the most up-to-date information available on Boston's education pipeline, from kindergarten through college graduation, including measures for school readiness, 3rd grade reading proficiency, 10th-grade academic proficiency, high school completion, dropout rates, college…

Recent studies continue to shine light on high-performing charter schools. While Boston-area charter schools--a concentrated group of high-performers--garner more attention than others, many excellent schools outside of Boston have been quietly chipping away at the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. One of these schools…

School success is a complex and abstract notion. Asking questions about what is meant by school success is important, since the ways in which educators and administrators define school success tends to guide their practice, and may have implications for current and future policy initiatives. This qualitative case study explores how one publicly…

This article addresses likely error rates for measuring teacher and school performance in the upper elementary grades using value-added models applied to student test score gain data. Using a realistic performance measurement system scheme based on hypothesis testing, the authors develop error rate formulas based on ordinary least squares and…