This article uses the history of debates over the US Head Start programme (1965), Early Head Start (1994) and the UK Sure Start initiative (1998), as a window on to policy transfer. In all the three, the aim was that early intervention could offer a means of boosting children's educational attainment and of countering the wider effects of poverty…

The National Survey of Student Engagement has been administered to freshmen and seniors at colleges and universities across the USA and Canada, since the spring of 2000, to gather information about the nature and the quality of their education. After each administration, participating schools are provided with an institutional report, including…

The high-stakes testing climate and the growing immigrant and English language-learning population have changed the face of teaching and learning in today's high schools. In this chapter, the authors emphasize the impact of a new paradigm of schooling based on high-stakes testing on Asian and Latin American students, as they represent the largest…

This article outlines the progress and impact of professional learning communities within, between and across schools, as part of the implementation of whole system reform in Wales. It describes the way in which professional learning communities are being developed to support improvement and change across the education system in Wales. The article…

Purpose: District effectiveness research (DER) is an emerging field concerned with identifying the organizational structures, administration, and leadership practices at the school district level that help districts find success with all of their students across the schools within the system. This work has mirrored much of the early school…

This article describes an experiment utilizing a research and development strategy to design and implement an innovative school for the future. The development of Cramim Elementary School was a joint effort of researchers from Tel-Aviv University and the staff of the school. The design stage involved constructing a new theoretical framework that…

The study examined the effect of charter school attendance on annual student achievement growth in math and reading.The research described in this report is consistent with WWC evidence standards with reservations. Strengths: Matched charter school students to similar students in traditional public schools using demographic and academic…

This article reviews the changing relationships between education policies and their links to social disadvantage and conceptions of school leadership. The argument is that definitions of leadership evolve as the assumptions underpinning the relationships between society, the economy and education institutions change. The article draws on the case…

This report presents the value-added models that will be used to measure school and teacher effectiveness in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) in the 2010-2011 school year. It updates the earlier technical report, "Measuring Value Added for IMPACT and TEAM in DC Public Schools." The earlier report described the methods used…

This report is the culmination of a yearlong effort to study the efficiency of the nation's public education system and includes the first-ever attempt to evaluate the productivity of almost every major school district in the country. In the business world, the notion of productivity describes the benefit received in exchange for effort or money…

The Texas Education Agency (TEA) was awarded Charter School Program (CSP) funding in 2007, and specified that the required evaluation would focus on the experiences and outcomes of new charter schools authorized to begin serving students across 4 school years: 2006-07, 2007-08, 2008-09, and 2009-10. TEA categorizes charter schools in terms of…

IMPACT is the District of Columbia Public Schools' (DCPS) system for assessing and rewarding the performance of teachers and other school-based staff. This system is called IMPACT because the adults serving in the DCPS have the ability to make a dramatic, positive impact on students' lives. The system is designed to help staff become more…

NCLB and Reading First are negotiated in implementing beginning reading instruction. The article describes and analyzes how two critical conditions for creating opportunity--access to qualified teachers and rigorous academic curriculum--are met by examining the enactment and adaptation of a prescriptive core reading program disproportionately…

The author, a former headteacher and now a county councillor, argues that the structural changes to the education system put in place in the first weeks of the new government in the summer of 2010 will exacerbate the gap between the highest and lowest achieving schools, will destabilise the state-funded education system, will expose it to…

Awareness of the potential of quality teaching (or teacher excellence in content, knowledge and pedagogy) to impact upon student achievement is an outcome of recent school-effectiveness research. This research has extended the understanding of the conception of "teacher" beyond surface factual learning to that of induction into learning…