At present, the structures, practice, and discourse of schooling are anchored to a "commercial spirit" that understands students, educators, and parents as economic operators trading competitively in human capital and to a discourse of failure that is disabling those who seek to understand and enact John Dewey's notion of education as…

There are large social class inequalities in educational achievement in the UK. This paper quantifies the contribution of one mechanism to the production of these inequalities: social class differences in school "effectiveness," where "effectiveness" refers to a school's impact on pupils' educational achievement (relative to…

The Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School is an application-based magnet program utilizing a curriculum focused on science, mathematics, and computer science catering to interested, talented, and eager to learn students in Montgomery County, Maryland. This article identifies and discusses some of the unique aspects of the Magnet Program…

The researchers surveyed 23 North Carolina high schools that had markedly improved their graduation rates over the past five years. The administrators reported on the dropout prevention practices and programs to which they attributed their improved graduation rates. The majority of schools reported policy changes, especially with suspension. The…

We examine the effect of attending private secondary school on educational achievement, as measured by students' scores in a comprehensive standardized math test, in two Indian states: Orissa and Rajasthan. We use propensity score matching (PSM) to control for any systematic differences between students attending private secondary schools and…

Professional learning communities (PLC) have been widely accepted as effective with respect to good atmosphere, adequate leadership practices, and functional working practices. However, the outcomes for school improvement depend on case-specific issues. To identify less culturally and contextually bound issues in 3 PLC settings in Canada, Finland,…

Effective leadership and management are increasingly recognised as vital components of successful schooling. This paper examines how they are practiced in England, where there is a high degree of centralization, notably in respect of finance and staffing, but within a tightly constrained curriculum and inspection framework. The paper discusses…

This paper examines the "ecological validity" of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in 42 high schools to measure the impact of a content literacy program. This study of comparable schools implementing the same program in different contexts highlights characteristics that are often not attended to in rigorous effectiveness…

The current article presents a multifaceted model of risk and resilience that employs selected lenses to reveal insights from a variety of disciplines. This enhanced model, originally based on Bronfenbrenner's (1989) ecological framework, was developed to interpret the results of an ongoing study, conducted by the first two authors, of students'…

The longstanding concerns of the author relative to society's tendency to make the public schools "responsible for all of society's problems" is addressed. The concerns as updated in this article have been expressed over the years as the author moved around the southeast in several letters to editors along the way.

The aim of this study is to examine relationship between the physical education course sportspersonship behaviors and respect levels for high school students. The sample of study consists of randomly selected 505 high school students (215 female and 290 male) attending state schools in the province of Istanbul in 2016-2017 academic year.…

Collaboration between teachers constitutes an important predictor for the successful implementation of digital media in schools and teaching. The present contribution examines the supporting conditions of ICT (information and communications technology)-related teacher collaboration as a feature of school quality in six selected European…

Purpose: Our primary purpose is to examine the degree to which state equity plans identify the distribution of principals and principal turnover as factors influencing three leadership mechanisms that affect student access to effective teachers--namely, hiring of teachers, building instructional capacity of teachers, and managing teacher turnover.…

This article examines school-level responses to subgroup accountability pressure through an ethnographic case study of a school cited for failing to make adequate yearly progress for student subgroups. Concerns about the calculations and measures used to derive the citation and reservations about acting on accountability data delegitimized the…

This dissertation consists of three essays using publicly reported internal control deficiencies to examine agency conflicts in the unique organizational setting provided by nonprofit charter schools. In my first essay, I find evidence that increased agency conflicts in nonprofit charter schools are "not" associated with increased…