When provided with an opportunity to reflect upon their experiences of education, young people can often offer insights into those procedures and actions which have either supported or inhibited learning. In this article Richard Rose and Michael Shevlin describe how a team of researchers came together with a group of young people from marginalized…

With the premise that schooling should make a difference in students' everyday experience, the authors synthesize research on the influence of school learning on students' out-of-school experience by addressing the contributions and shortcomings of four research areas: (a) transfer, (b) out-of-school learning environments, (c) school-prompted…

In multilevel regression, centering the model variables produces effects that are different and sometimes unexpected compared with those in traditional regression analysis. In this article, the main contributions in terms of meaning, assumptions, and effects underlying a multilevel centering solution are reviewed, emphasizing advantages and…

Do Brazilian authorities have an interest in school improvement? Is the connection between school improvement (process) and school effectiveness (status) widely understood? What are the benefits and risks of a partnership between Brazilian governmental and non-governmental organizations in implementing educational projects? This article reports on…

Students of American politics have had little to say about public sector unions and their impacts on government. There is, of course, a vast literature on public bureaucracy. But that literature has always emphasized that the power of bureaucrats is rooted in their expertise, or in the entrepreneurial activities of agency leaders. It has largely…

Like the bestselling first edition, this introductory textbook succinctly presents concepts and theories of educational leadership and organizational behavior and immediately applies them to problems of practice. It includes practical case studies, real-world scenarios and analyses, reflection questions, and straightforward explanations of…

Illinois is the Land of Lincoln. In this great state, Lincoln got his start as a lawyer and a politician. In his 1832 Address to the People of Sangamon County, Lincoln outlined his vision for a practical and general education in which "every man may receive at least a moderate education, and thereby be enabled to read the histories of his own…

"Real Leaders, Real Schools" tells the stories of five urban public school principals who led their schools through profound and transformative changes. In each of these cases, their efforts resulted in dramatic improvements in student achievement--improvements that occurred within the current environment of high-stakes tests. The revealing and…

One of the central challenges of designing and implementing a performance pay program is developing an approach for determining which schools, teachers, and administrators have performed well enough to have earned a bonus. The U.S. Department of Education's Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) program provides grantees substantial latitude to create…

By 2007, more than 950 charter schools, some of them nearly 15 years old, were operating in 13 SREB states, with enrollments approaching 350,000 students. This report explores how the achievement of charter school students in certain SREB states compares with the achievement of traditional public school students, and it examines roles of statewide…

The article reports a study of factors associated with different levels of examination performance among thirty secondary schools in a district of Kenya. There are very limited data on school effectiveness in developing countries but there is some evidence that resource levels and aspects of teacher quality may be important. The research found…

Purpose: This article describes how trust emerged as an issue in one school district and the processes by which central office administrators enhanced trust with its school site leaders. Method: This exploratory participant observer case study uses multiple sources of data including surveys, interviews, observations, and documents collected during…

Effective schools should be superior in both enhancing students' achievement levels and reducing the gap between high- and low-achieving students in the school. However, the focus has been placed mainly on schools' achievement levels in most school effect studies. In this article, we focused our attention upon the school-specific achievement…

The Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) II data are analysed, using multilevel modelling techniques, to explore the key issues underlying the development of school effectiveness models. Differences between schools in Grade 6 pupils' reading and mathematics achievements are examined and the percentage…

When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic…