The Academy for External Facilitators is a significant component of AEL's Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration and is the subject of this report. External facilitators are usually assigned by state departments of education to assist low-performing schools. This report summarizes evaluation of the second summer institute of the Academy for…

States that examination results for 3000+ Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) inspected secondary schools, offering General Certificate of Secondary Education student examinations during the 1992 1997 inspection cycle, were modeled statistically. Finds that schools currently with higher or lower achievement averages saw slight improvement.…

Compared faculty (n=794) and administrator (n=541) perspectives on the importance of institutional effectiveness activities in higher education and measures the impact of four control variables related to perceptions about such activities. Findings suggest some strategies institutions may use to cultivate faculty and administrative support for…

Offers perspective on the drive for performance-based funding in higher education and describes results of new research in this field being conducted at James Madison University. (EV)

Discusses how the University of Phoenix's online program is gaining more students and more accolades for its business and teaching successes. (EV)

Examined how school-based management (SBM) at the school, group, and individual levels is related to school performance at different levels. From a sample of 82 Hong Kong schools, the strength of multi-level self-management in schools was found to be strongly related to quality indicators of organizational performance, and moderately correlated to…

Just as students are being held accountable with standardized testing, schools in many states are being judged by scores on these tests. This article discusses evaluation variables and factors that influence how well children perform on tests, explains school assessment, then focuses on Indiana, where there has been public argument about the…

Discusses six issues faced by members of the Effective School Improvement project carried out in eight European countries. After posing questions that need further resolution, the article concludes that at this moment caution is advisable before transferring the findings from one context to the other. (SLD)

Introduction to the two articles in this issue. Provides background information on a longitudinal study of Flanders secondary schools and on the study's sample, method, and variables relevant to the two articles. Also describes the organization of secondary education in Flanders. (Contains 33 references.) (PKP)

Argues that, although middle, junior, and senior high school educators should be proud that they are leading the way for their counterparts in higher education, they must also recognize that they cannot slacken their own efforts for quality and accountability. (RS)

The job satisfaction and effectiveness of principals, the effectiveness of their schools, and the relationships among these 3 variables were investigated through questionnaires and interviews involving 112 elementary school principals, 262 teachers, and 9 area superintendents. (54 references) (MLF)

The Texas Education Agency has outlined proficiencies designed to help Texas school administrators become learner centered in leadership style, climate setting, curriculum and instruction, diversity, communication, and professional development. These proficiencies are grounded in the concept of transformational leadership. (Contains 23…

Discusses issues involved in the identification of schools with the lowest student performance and uses test data for New York City elementary schools to demonstrate the extent to which choices about how to aggregate individual test results can affect the identification of low-performing schools. Introduces fuzzy logic as a tool for identifying…

The recent development of multilevel IRT models (Fox & Glas, 2001, 2003) has been shown to be very useful for analyzing relationships between observed variables on different levels containing measurement error. Model parameter estimates and their standard deviations are concurrently estimated taking account of measurement error in observed…

Realizing the importance of education in developing a country, many governments had begun to pay more attention in improving the education quality in their country. However whether the desired level of education quality is equally distributed is still debated on. On top of that, current literature on which level of education, either basic or…