Community schools are a sound education reform strategy that gets results. They start by asking local students and their families what they need to succeed in school, then they reach out to relevant community partners and use the school as the hub for organizing partnerships, services, and supports. By listening closely to the assets and needs of…

Under emerging policy structures in California, the responsibility for school improvement is increasingly placed upon local school districts, with County Offices of Education (COEs) playing a critical support role. In this system, districts are responsible for school improvement, with counties in charge of ensuring quality across districts and…

This study examined the relationship between the effectiveness of a school's instructional coaching program and collective teacher efficacy. Instructional coaching is the concept of providing ongoing, on-site support for teachers on how to use best practice teaching methods and how to assess the effect these methods have on instruction (Knight,…

What is assessment literacy? It is a handful of fundamental understandings about the testing concepts and procedures that influence educational decisions. And it just might be the most cost-effective means of real school improvement. With characteristic humor and aplomb, assessment expert W. James Popham strips away the psychometrician-speak and…

One of Ohio's oldest public charter schools, Toledo School for the Arts (TSA) was forged from concerns about the state of arts education, especially performing arts and dance. For young people with a keen interest in the arts, any shortage of offerings limits opportunities and may lead to less engagement in school. The latest entry in the Pathway…

Urban K-12 public schools often face challenges that are not found in schools located in suburban areas. Students in urban schools are often not prepared to attend college and are more likely to drop out of high school. This is often the result of limited resources in urban schools, yet educators are expected to close the achievement gap and…

This study capitalizes on the performance identification system under the No Child Left Behind waivers to estimate the school-level impact of just missing formal state recognition as a high-performing school. Using a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design and data from the early years of waiver implementation in Rhode Island, we find that, when…

State and federal accountability policies are predicated on the ability to estimate valid and reliable measures of school impacts on student learning. The typical spring-to-spring testing window potentially conflates the amount of learning that occurs during the school year with learning that occurs during the summer. We use a unique dataset to…

This article presents interview data from a study involving nine primary school leaders. Five are leaders of local authority schools while four are leaders of schools within a large academy chain. The article examines their perspectives about the current regimes of performativity in the English education context and, in particular, the…

This paper examined the statistical approach adopted by schools to communicate their academic achievement to stakeholders. The paper looked at the most frequently adopted method, the use of percentage scores, and discussed the limitations of its usage. The paper also explored the use of the weighted average of scores and compared it to the use of…

This paper explores how early years teachers respond to policy, using the case of Baseline Assessment, a new statutory assessment introduced to Reception classes (age 4-5) in England in 2015. Using interview and survey data collected during the period when the policy was introduced, the paper examines how teachers engaged in different forms of…

This study was conducted to identify the level of practice of critical thinking skills (CTS) and to determine whether the dimensions of perception and readiness of the teachers were the predictors of the implementation of the CTS. A cross-sectional quantitative approach using questionnaires have been used on 226 Mathematics teachers teaching in…

We investigate student mobility in a choice-based system that has gone to scale, New Orleans, to gain insight into an underlying improvement mechanism of choice-based reform and its potential equity-related consequences. In contrast to typical analyses of mobility, this study distinguishes incumbent school characteristics that can cause students…

The Pupil Premium Grant was introduced in 2011 with the aim to 'close' the attainment gap within education between children classified as disadvantaged and their peers. However, recent research has shown that this gap appears to be widening across the education sector. This article explores the reasons why the Pupil Premium Grant was introduced,…

Every family deserves access to the information they need to understand the quality of their community's schools and to make the best decision about their child's education. School report cards are the primary way that states communicate the information that families want and need about schools, but too often, the report cards are more focused on…