This paper is concerned with the importance of testing and developing integrated multilevel educational effectiveness models through comparative studies in educational effectiveness. It is argued that secondary analyses of international comparative studies could help researchers test and develop integrated multilevel educational effectiveness…

"The Routledge Companion to Education" presents the most comprehensive, up-to-date guide available to the key theories, themes and topics in education. Forty specially commissioned chapters, covering all aspects of education, introduce you to the ideas, research and issues that have shaped this most diverse, dynamic and fluid field. Part one…

Can money buy high-quality education? Studies find only a weak relationship between public school funding and educational outcomes. In "The Money Myth", W. Norton Grubb proposes a powerful paradigm shift in the way we think about why some schools thrive and others fail. The greatest inequalities in America's schools lie in factors other…

A critical component for successful schools is effective leadership. In the 1980's the concept of leadership emerged and the rules changed for school principals (Lashway, 2002). Previously, administrators were primarily evaluated based upon their abilities in managing school facilities and operations efficiently. Academics became the new focus.…

The purpose of this study is to expand the definition of adequacy by adding soft skills as a measure of school productivity. The singular focus on academic standards inherent in education policy has prevented scholars from seeing the concept of adequacy through myriad perspectives and has contributed to a resegregation of schools. Education policy…

From zero in 1991 to 3,800 eighteen years later, charter schools (public schools under contract) today educate well over a million students. This updated, second edition examines the unusual experiment that is charter education and the controversies that surround public choice and charter schools as a means of educational reform. Written by…

Parents and taxpayers are frustrated by reports of students who have failed to master the reading, writing, and thinking skills they expect of college graduates. They are searching for evidence of how much or how little students learn at competing institutions. And they are wondering why a third of full-time college graduates don't finish a…

Missouri is the "Show Me" State. And with this goal in mind, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) offers this report card to examine the state of higher education in Missouri. If the nation is to ensure its continued preeminence in higher education, policymakers, trustees, alumni, and taxpayers must know what is going on in…

For this systematic review, the author examines 59 findings from 21 quantitative studies regarding the effects of school choice on seven civic values that relate to the capacity of individuals to perform as effective citizens in a representative democracy. The values, in order from the most studied to the least studied, are: (1) Political…

Holistic school renewal will require a qualitatively different discourse than the current uneasy conversations about school improvement and school effectiveness. Leadership for whole school renewal requires emotionally safe spaces for learning and growing together. Visions of school leadership as distributed, distributive and shared are grounded…

Drawing on new institutional and market theories, this article derives three hypotheses for the effects of markets on educational organizations: They (1) weaken formal structures, (2) reverse tendencies toward isomorphism, and (3) force schools to recouple and compete via performance indicators. These ideas are investigated with data on private…

Educational reformers in New Zealand and England have turned their attention towards network creation as a way of facilitating school improvement. The idea is that greater collaboration can drive school improvement through building professional learning communities, spreading best practice, and driving innovation in education. It is based on a…

Although this author expresses her belief in public education, and states that homeschooling her two sons was not her first choice, she describes how she feels that she was forced into this decision by a school system that was insensitive to the special needs of her children. She discusses the experiences of her two boys in a local,…

This paper describes second-year outcomes in three New Jersey schools that participated in the Effective Demonstration Schools Project, a grants program that encouraged school-based improvement. The purpose of the three-year grants, awarded during the 1985-86 school year, was to improve students' basic skills performance through the application of…

This guidebook was designed to be used as a resource by teachers and school administrators interested in implementing school-based reforms. It provides examples of promising reform strategies and lessons learned from a national study of school-based reform. The congressionally mandated study of Effective Schools Programs was conducted by an…