This article discusses how benefits can be used to market a school. Creating emotional attachment can help use benefits to market the school and its programs to a target audience. Such emotional attachment can be created through clear and concise benefit statements. Powerful benefit statements that project a clear picture of the programs, services…

Measures of school performance based on pupil attainment are becoming more sophisticated, with DfES piloting "contextualized value-added" measures. However, most such measures are based on simple sums of residuals about "expected" values, but it is clear from national data that distributions of performance are not symmetrical…

This article examines three areas that are of central importance to the pedagogy of the National Literacy Strategy Framework for Teaching (FFT) at primary level: inspection evidence; school effectiveness (SE) research; and child development evidence. Analysis of national inspection reports on the teaching of English illustrates that these cannot…

In recent years, several large urban districts, including Cincinnati, Cleveland, Milwaukee, New York City, Philadelphia, Portland, and Kansas City, Missouri have converted their middle schools (generally grades 6-8) to K-8 schools in the hope of improving student achievement, attendance, and behavior, while also enhancing parental involvement. The…

Concerns about effective use of school instructional time have been evident for many years. The more stringent demands of the newer accountability mechanisms have obligated educators to renew efforts to optimize the teaching and learning process. This study addressed the nature and extent of classroom instructional time erosion by external…

The gross differences in scholastic achievement among public, private government-dependent, and private independent schools in 22 countries are analyzed with Programme for International Student Assessment 2000 data. In a multilevel approach, the authors estimate these sector effects, controlling for sociological characteristics of students and…

In this article a study is presented in which teachers describe the working situation at their school. The aim of the study was to find out in what respects the school needed to be developed. The study was a case study and the method for collecting data was focus group dialogues. All teacher teams at a Swedish secondary school participated. The…

Much of Michael Pressley's work during the past decade focused on the nature of highly effective, engaging literacy instruction. Michael Pressley believed that studying effective teachers and schools had the potential to influence more engaging and effective teaching, especially in underresourced schools. First, we describe the grounded…

This report, which is the second annual report on charter schools in California by the University of Southern California's (USC's) Center on Educational Governance, offers a unique view of charter school performance. Using both financial and academic data submitted by school districts to the state of California, this report looks well beyond test…

Across the nation, urban school districts struggle to raise often abysmally low high school graduation rates. New York City, with a four-year graduation rate of 57 percent, is no exception. Yet, some high schools in New York, as elsewhere, succeed beyond expectations in bringing students with low academic skills and high needs to graduation in…

"Good Schools in Poor Neighborhoods" contrasts highly effective schools serving urban, low-income, minority youth with their more typical, struggling counterparts. Highlighted are two disparate schools: one serving predominately African American students in a large northeastern city and one serving Latino students in a southwestern urban area.…

The professional competences of middle school mathematics teachers has been identified, also the significance extent of such competences for chinese and yemenies mathematics teachers has been studied. The researcher used descriptive research approach. The study data collected from Specialist educators and teachers experts to determine the…

This report presents the results from a seven-month study of successful schools in California performed by the American Institutes for Research (AIR). It explored some of the concepts underlying the "successful schools" approach to defining education adequacy and considered their implications for analyzing educational adequacy in…

What happens in a school when, despite teachers' best efforts in the classroom, students do not learn? The administrators and faculty members at Papillion-La Vista South High School in Nebraska asked themselves this question when they realized that some of their students were struggling, were not turning in work, did not seem to care, and were…

This study addresses a campus institutional effectiveness (IE) process and its influence on faculty and staff. Although a comprehensive, rational IE process appeals to campus leaders, this study found that it creates significant faculty and staff challenges. Campus leaders, faculty, and staff differ in their (a) knowledge and support of IE; (b)…