This guide helps educators implement a continuous school improvement system through application of the seven correlates of effective schools. The authors discuss each correlate, update the knowledge base, and incorporate practical ideas from practitioners in the field. A comprehensive description of practices enables educators to build and sustain a school culture that accommodates the learning expectations and needs of all students.

This book explores the key characteristics that make a school effective.

A model for improving school and classroom effectiveness must pay attention to: (1) leadership; (2) school climate; (3) supervision; (4) teacher behaviors; (5) student behaviors; and (6) student achievement. Chapter 1 of this book on effective schools and classrooms introduces these important issues and describes a model incorporating these issues. Chapter 2 reviews research about student and teacher behaviors and how they affect classroom effectiveness. Chapter 3 suggests ways administrators can help teachers promote student involvement, coverage, and success through positive supervision. Research concerning effective schools is the topic of chapter 4, and chapter 5 demonstrates how indicators of effective schools are grouped into the more general categories of school climate and leadership. Chapter 6 uses a hypothetical case study to show how school leadership processes can promote a school climate where there is an academic emphasis, an orderly environment, and expectations for success. The chapter ends with suggestions for superintendents and school boards for improving student achievement. Chapter 7 includes a questionnaire for assessing a school's effectiveness. The eighth chapter discusses principles of the school improvement process. A summary is offered in the ninth chapter, and appendices provide information on monitoring student behavior and the policy statement of a school district on school effectiveness. (JMK)

This volume explores the influence of students' background on educational outcomes, ways of contextualising school performance, and current issues and developments in school effectiveness research. Also investigated is how the research contributes to understanding of school and classroom processes.

Raise organizational effectiveness to improve the quality of instruction and dramatically impact student achievement! Working in tandem with the powerful National Education Association′s KEYS initiative (Keys to Excellence in Your Schools), this second edition focuses on how to change a school′s organizational structure and culture to improve the quality of teaching and learning. Each chapter, revised and updated to address continuous improvement and narrowing the achievement gap, provides a wealth of knowledge from leading experts in the field including Patricia A. Alexander, Eva L. Baker, James A. Banks, Peter Cookson, Lorna M. Earl, Richard F. Elmore, Michael Fullan, Geneva Gay, Willis D. Hawley, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Kenneth Leithwood, Ann Lieberman, Judith Warren Little, Lynne Miller, P. Karen Murphy, Fred M. Newmann, Sonia Nieto, Janet Ward Schofield, Walter G. Stephan, Gary Sykes, and Linda Valli. Educators at all levels, policymakers, and parents will discover how to apply the lessons learned from research. This essential handbook provides new chapters, including exemplary practice on teaching and learning for a multicultural society and on continuous school improvement. Now you can advance to the next level of change with an integral resource for school reform.

Natalie Rathvon appears as sole author on first (1999) and second (2008) editions' title pages.

As a consequence of the federal "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) law, there is tremendous pressure on school principals, teachers, school superintendents, district staff, state departments of education and governors to maximize the increase in student achievement that is obtained with every dollar of expenditure. Currently, teachers are forced to rely on extremely inefficient approaches that take enormous amounts of time, both during the school day and throughout the K-12 learning years. This is experienced in terms of the reduced time that is available to teach subjects other than math and reading, as schools resort to double periods of math, double periods of reading, and enormous amounts of remedial instruction that directly reduce the time available for other subjects including science, art, and music. In contrast, this book suggests that student achievement may be increased in a way that is not only cost-effective in dollar terms, but efficient in the sense that it does not rely on unusual investments in the time required to obtain results. The book draws upon a wealth of cost-effectiveness data to dispel common notions about "what works" in addressing the achievement gap: increased expenditure per pupil, charter schools, voucher programs, increased educational accountability, class size reduction, comprehensive school reform, increased teacher salaries, more selective teacher recruitment, the use of "value-added" methods to measure and reward teacher performance, the use of National Board teacher certification to identify high-performing teachers, and a host of other approaches.

"This book examines the changes, and reasons for the changes, in ways in which schools have been judged to be 'good' or 'effective'. A major focus is the development from the 1970s of a research-based movement in Britain, the United States and elsewhere that has explored school effectiveness and improvement. The author traces the development of the American and British research, and the ways in which it affected American school policy and practice - and failed to do so in competition with national policies that aimed at a national curriculum, assessment and related changes." "In order to consider the nature of this effective schools research and movement, the book sets them against a background of nineteenth- and twentieth-century judgements of what, in Britain, has constituted a good school. It traces the power of inspectors, examinations, governments, managers and others to make judgements and to define the criteria for making judgements, and ways in which research also became influential. This book is therefore an important piece of recent history, using mainly Britain and the United States to explain and illustrate the changes, and focusing on concepts of central importance in current schools policy and practice internationally."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Advances in School Effectiveness Research and Practice presents a worldwide state-of-the-art summary of the rapidly growing field of school effectiveness research by an internationally renowned group of authors. Current knowledge in the field is reviewed to present an integrated and coherent, internationally valid perspective on school effectiveness and instructional effectiveness. The book creatively outlines some new directions in which the field should move if it is to fulfil its promise. These include the development of international studies and the generating and testing of school effectiveness theory.

This vol. explores reading practices in sch's where at-risk stud's beat the odds in learning to read. Some chapters take a broad view, compar. practices across sch's & classrooms, while others deal with the story of a single project over multiple sites.