Large numbers of schools across the country are low performing and have been for years. This longstanding and widespread problem painfully reveals that individual schools are not the only ones responsible for their performance. The public school system as a whole is unable, and sometimes unwilling, to address the root causes of dysfunction.…

The authors of this monograph assert that by assisting school systems to more closely resemble "high reliability" organizations (HROs) that already exist in other industries and benchmarking against top-performing education systems from around the globe, America's school systems can transform themselves from compliance-driven…

The importance of reading fluently is widely recognized in school effectiveness, reform, and improvement efforts of the educational community, yet there are few large-scale, structured assessments of the progression of students' reading rates over time. This study documented 2nd-grade students' oral reading rates on the basis of fall, winter, and…

The term "institutional effectiveness" was developed in response to accreditation, and this emphasizes the large extent to which accreditation drives institutional effectiveness efforts on community college campuses. There are two general types of accreditation. "Institutional accreditation" is the process by which institutions of higher education…

"Contextual value added" (CVA) scores have been used as a means of monitoring school performance in England since 2007. This article explains how these scores are calculated using biographical pupil data (including ethnicity, gender and Free School Meal status) in order to judge the impact of a school on pupils' attainment. This article…

"How It's Being Done" offers much-needed help to educators, providing detailed accounts of the ways in which unexpected schools--those with high-poverty and high-minority student populations--have dramatically boosted student achievement and diminished (and often eliminated) achievement gaps. "How It"s Being Done" builds on Karin Chenoweth's…

The chosen focus of this special issue is timely given the burgeoning international interest and investment in leadership development and school improvement. In many countries leadership and improvement have been closely linked and there is no doubt that this linkage has an international reach. Together, these articles review and extend some of…

Much educational effectiveness research has been conducted over the past 40 years in developed countries, whereas few studies have focused on developing or newly industrialized countries such as the People's Republic of China. The case studies discussed in this article are part of a larger multiple-case, mixed-methods study that investigated 6…

Fixed effects models are often useful in longitudinal studies when the goal is to assess the impact of teacher or school characteristics on student learning. In this article, I introduce an alternative procedure: adaptive centering with random effects. I show that this procedure can replicate the fixed effects analysis while offering several…

The ability of school (or teacher) value-added models to provide unbiased estimates of school (or teacher) effects rests on a set of assumptions. In this article, we identify six assumptions that are required so that the estimands of such models are well defined and the models are able to recover the desired parameters from observable data. These…

The success or failure of a school reform can be measured by whether the reform has become an accepted, effective, and sustainable part of the school's culture. For example, as the National Middle School Association (2003) argued, "new programs must become integral to the school culture" (p. 11) before a school can call itself a…

This paper assesses the cumulative long-term impact of successive years of high quality provision in schools. This was achieved by looking at the consequences, up to the age of 11 (Year 6), of attending a school where there was high or low value-added in each of the 7 years of primary education in England. Multi-level models for thousands of…

Organizing curriculum and instruction in PK-12 public schools in relation to standardization practices presents individuals with the inherent paradox of limiting education to that which is already known and anticipated. Paradigmatically linked to politico-economic and religious fundamentalisms, this pedagogical fundamentalism explicitly organizes…

This document reports the procedure and outcomes associated with a project focusing on educational research and development (R&D) based resources in the essential components of school improvement systems. Yet, the dissemination of and access to these R&D resources can be a complicated process. Access to educational resources and information…

The College Pathways series grew out of the findings in "Beating the Odds," a study of thirteen high-performing New York City high schools by Carol Ascher and Cindy Maguire for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Each of the schools admitted ninth-graders with high poverty rates and far-below-average reading and math scores but produced…