Barry M. Franklin's new work uses the concept of community as a lens for interpreting urban school reform since 1960. Focusing on the curriculum and employing case studies, he applies the concept to reform initiatives in a number of city school systems. Included are compensatory education, community control, mayoral takeovers, educational…

Today's urban secondary principals face many challenges. They have to not only manage their schools, but also be effective instructional leaders, often changing instructional practices in order to promote student achievement. This involves the support of many, most notably the superintendent, in order to be done well and make their school a highly…

This dissertation investigates the prevailing No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandate as an effective platform to improve schools. The data compiled for use in this study represented 426 high schools in Pennsylvania and were retrieved from publicly accessible, state-sponsored sources. The statistical methodologies from the Pennsylvania Value-Added…

The aims of this study were to explore the organisational characteristics of junior high schools, to identify typologies of work environments and to explore the relationships between the type of work environment and how schools function. The educational profession and the role of teachers have been influenced by policies inspired by the principles…

New "autonomy initiatives" aim to increase schools' decision-making authority as a strategy to leverage school improvement. These policies build on lessons of previous reforms such as site-based management in ways that bode well for their success. However, how are these policies actually faring in implementation? The authors addressed that…

With the enactment of standards-based accountability in education, high-stakes tests have become the dominant method for measuring school effectiveness and student achievement. Schools and educators are under increasing pressure to meet achievement standards. However, there are variables which may interfere with the authentic measurement of…

This paper describes student-level findings of the first large-scale comprehensive school effectiveness study of the primary education in Serbia. Twenty-five student-level variables were examined in a three-level HLM model using a study sample of almost 5000 students, over 250 classrooms and over 100 schools. Differences between the students were…

"Charting New Territory: Tapping Charter Schools to Turn Around the Nation's Dropout Factories" argues for a more prominent role for charter operators in turning around perennially low-performing high schools. However, the report's ultimate findings and conclusions are out of proportion to the strength of the research evidence on school…

This study estimates program effects (English immersion versus primary language instruction using varying degrees of Spanish) upon English and Spanish word identification in the context of changing classrooms (cross-classification) from kindergarten through second grade. Letter-word identification is an important predictor of early reading…

The pressure to meet the demands of "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) Act coupled with poor results by secondary students on national assessments in mathematics have forced school principals to develop skill sets in the use of data in efforts to increase student performance on standardized assessments. The effective use of data by school…

In this article, we reviewed the empirical literature concerning the relationship between school size and student performance with a focus was on determining the extent to which school size, specifically elementary school size, was related to student academic achievement. Most of the extant literature was on secondary school size with fewer…

Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of…

As the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law moves through the reauthorization process, it is important to understand the basic performance impacts of its central structure of accountability. In this paper, I examine the effects of failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) under NCLB on subsequent student math and reading performance at the school…

Improving the quality of secondary education in public schools requires involving all stakeholders in identifying and applying appropriate expectations. Many adult stakeholders are seeking action to eliminate the disparity between state and federal estimates of student achievement and to enable comparisons between the performance of students and…

The primary users of the current college ranking systems do not seem to be high-school students and families, but college presidents, board members, and development officers. As structured, the commercial ranking systems imply a precision that is not corroborated by research on what matters in college, nor can college quality be accurately summed…