School Improvement Strategies Research Articles

“Spreading the Wealth”: How Principals Use Performance Data to Populate Classrooms

There is evidence that school leaders are using test score data for decisions about everything from the curriculum to what is served for lunch. Research suggests that staffing too is data-driven, with principals using test score data to hire, assign, and develop their teachers. Semi-structured interviews with principals and other school actors in 10 case study elementary schools show that while principals report using test score data as they assign students to classes, they are not using the assignment process as a strategy for overall school improvement, but instead to ensure within-class heterogeneity and a sense of “fairness” among teachers.

Teacher evaluation and school improvement: An analysis of the evidence

In recent years, substantial investments have been made in reengineering systems of teacher evaluation. The new generation models of teacher evaluation typically adopt a standards-based view of teaching quality and include a value-added measure of growth in student learning. With more than a decade of experience and research, it is timely to assess empirical evidence bearing on the efficacy of this school improvement strategy. This paper examines the new generation of teacher evaluation along three lines of analysis: evidence on the magnitude, consistency, and stability of teacher effects on student learning, evidence on the impact of teacher evaluation on growth in student learning, and literature from the sociology of organizations on how schools function. Although the trend towards focusing on teacher evaluation is increasingly evident internationally, most of the empirical research evaluated in this paper is from the USA. This critical evaluation of the empirical literature yields two key conclusions. First, we conclude that the policy logic supporting this reform remains considerably stronger than the empirical evidence. Second, we suggest that alternative improvement strategies may yield more positive results and at a lower cost in terms of staff time and district funds.

The Design And Implementation Of A Strategic Plan In Primary Schools

Many policies, strategies and plans have been introduced in South African schools so as to acquire quality education. A strategic plan, as a mechanism of putting schools on a pathway of development and effectiveness over a period of time, is one of these initiatives. Its introduction is based on a number of reasons inter-alia - the shift to school self-management, the introduction of Norms and Standards, and the introduction of School Governing Bodies (SGBs). A schools strategic plan is the physical document that embodies the guiding orientation regarding how to manage the school within a larger national and local development perspective. Such a plan can lead to school effectiveness, improvement and development strategies, but not all plans obtain this status because of design efficiencies. A qualitative investigation was done in two primary schools in the Mahikeng Area Office (AO) of the North-West Province in South Africa. Document analysis, in-depth interviews with two principals and two SGB chairpersons, as well as a focus group interview with eight teachers from participating schools, were used to collect data on how primary schools in question design and implement their strategic plans. The investigation seems to suggest that, while an individual school community may craft a strategic plan in its own way, there are common aspects that underpin the entire process. Amongst others, technical knowledge and skill for its execution are necessary. Some policies emphasise the importance of a strategic plan and serve as an integrated implementation framework for its execution. It is concluded that a strategic plan is designed and implemented under three main elements: 1) strategic analysis, which is made up of stakeholder involvement; 2) strategic choices made up of direction-setting, priority determinations, mission, and vision; and 3) strategy in action, which refers to the process of translating the plan into action.

Effective Instructional Time Use for School Leaders

Scholars have long argued that principals should be instructional leaders, but few studies have empirically linked specific instructional leadership behaviors to school performance. This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of approximately 100 urban principals collected over 3 school years. We find that principals’ time spent broadly on instructional functions does not predict student achievement growth. Aggregating across leadership behaviors, however, masks that some specific instructional investments predict year-to-year gains. In particular, time spent on teacher coaching, evaluation, and developing the school’s educational program predict positive achievement gains. In contrast, time spent on informal classroom walkthroughs negatively predicts student growth, particularly in high schools. Additional survey and interview evidence suggests this negative association may arise because principals often do not use walkthroughs as part of a broader school improvement strategy.

A Review of School Climate Research

For more than a century, there has been a growing interest in school climate. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Institute for Educational Sciences, a growing number of State Departments of Education, foreign educational ministries, and UNICEF have focused on school climate reform as an evidence-based school improvement strategy that supports students, parents/guardians, and school personnel learning and working together to create ever safer, more supportive and engaging K–12 schools. This work presents an integrative review on school climate research. The 206 citations used in this review include experimental studies, correlational studies, literature reviews, and other descriptive studies. The review focuses on five essential dimensions of school climate: Safety, Relationships, Teaching and Learning, Institutional Environment, and the School Improvement Process. We conclude with a critique of the field and a series of recommendations for school climate researchers and policymakers.

Challenged school – challenged society: stacking the odds against the poor

Using a micro-focus on one School Facing Exceptionally Challenging Circumstances (SFECC), the argument is developed using local, national and international data to show that areas of poverty are made and sustained. The challenged school is a product of a challenged society. With the condition of poverty come a range of difficulties in making educational provision for the children in the neighbourhood and limits to attainment levels reasonably achievable with currently allocated resources. The National Challenge strategy is counter-productive in its ambition to “drive up” standards and politicians and academics are practising a sad dishonesty in scrabbling round the edges with school improvement strategies that marginally affect individual schools. Such foci fail to acknowledge the simple poverty-attainment link. They fail also to note the cumulative experience from birth to school leaving and beyond and the potential multiple intervention points during the early life cycle to make a difference – if there were the will. Reducing levels of poverty in the local population and The Newington Children’s Zone as a form of Total Place project are components of a model which, with sustained, integrated investment across the whole childhood phase, might yield more in terms of social mobility and diminished harm.

School data – Getting back to basics

The collection and use of data is vital in schools today, but it is not the whole story. Former head Gerald Haigh visits three schools to find out how they use data and its place in school improvement strategies.

State Education Agencies’ Acquisition and Use of Research Knowledge for School Improvement

Over the last two decades, state education agencies (SEAs) have been given considerable responsibilities for improving low-performing schools and for adopting research-based practices in doing so. Yet we know little about how and where these organizations search for, select, and use research and other kinds of evidence. We examined these questions as they relate to school improvement designs and strategies in three SEAs using a combination of surveys and interviews conducted in 2010–11. We found that SEA staffs relied most heavily on their colleagues for information but that information often flowed across departments and offices, contrary to the usual image of the SEA as a segmented and siloed bureaucracy. A large number of external organizations were identified in SEA research advice networks and played a catalyzing role in the design or elaboration of research for policy. Although most sources were named by just one person, each SEA also had central internal staff who played an important role in brokering research on school improvement. Identifying and cultivating such influential actors, and connecting individuals who are now isolated or only weakly engaged in these communication networks, could create a more robust exchange of knowledge around school improvement.

Il ruolo della motivazione e della comprensione nello sviluppo della professionalitŕ degli insegnanti

This paper depicts the different paths followed by two teachers in the development of their professionalism, through their participation to a pilot group experimenting a fairly innovative teaching approach, inspired to Wiggins & McTighe's "Understanding by design (UbD)" methodology (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998; McTighe & Wiggins, 1999; Wiggins & McTighe, 2007). UbD is a constructivist way to organize teaching, involving significant changes to usual teaching practices. The project is part of a wider school improvement strategy actually taking place in a group of Swiss vocational schools (Ostinelli, 2007, 2008a), whereby teachers are supported by some School Improvement Advisor/researchers (SIA). The SIA can be roughly described as a figure being at the same time an advisor, a researcher and a critical friend. The key idea is, after the creation of some pilot groups, to "aggregate" other teachers and to disseminate the experience to other schools: the present article deals with the first, embryonic stage. In today's world, is quite important for teachers not only to accompany, but also to be able to prevent the change taking place inside schools; in this context, an evolution in their teaching practices is decisive. UbD can be a good path to follow in this journey, but, like various innovations, can be also difficult, either for the teacher and the SIA. This article will try to explain why one of the teachers assimilated the new methodology, improving his professionalism, while the other didn't. Why and how, in some circumstances, a lack of understanding of the situa- tion experienced can drive to negative consequences to the development of innovative teaching skills? Which is the role of motivation in this context? In order to try to give some answers to these questions, both teachers were firstly interviewed, and then a motivational test was administered to them. The collected informations proved useful for a better understanding of the dynamics underlying the described experience.

From professional development to system change: teacher leadership and innovation

This article argues for a particular conceptualisation of teacher leadership; one that enables us to overcome the limitations of established approaches to continuing professional development as a strategy for school improvement by mobilising the massive untapped potential of teachers as leaders of innovation. In this article, teacher leadership is conceived as a key dimension of the role of teachers regardless of special roles and responsibilities in the organisational structures of their schools. Evidence to support this argument is drawn from the International Teacher Leadership project, which has partners in 15 countries as diverse as Kosovo and New Zealand. The International Teacher Leadership project builds on a model developed in the United Kingdom (The HertsCam Network) to develop support for teacher leadership as an educational reform strategy. The article explores the professional learning arising for the teachers and offers a theory of educational innovation within which it is located.

Reconsidering replication: New perspectives on large-scale school improvement

The purpose of this analysis is to reconsider organizational replication as a strategy for large-scale school improvement: a strategy that features a “hub” organization collaborating with “outlet” schools to enact school-wide designs for improvement. To do so, we synthesize a leading line of research on commercial replication to construct a “knowledge-based logic” focused on the production, use, improvement, and retention of effective practices in large numbers of schools. Drawing on findings from a longitudinal case study, we then use the knowledge-based logic to structure an interpretation of Success for All, a leading comprehensive school reform program. In contrast to common assumptions of organizational replication as a strategy that yields rapid results at the expense of local and professional control, we argue that organizational replication can be understood as a long-term enterprise in which program providers and schools collaborate to produce, use, improve, and retain practical knowledge. Capitalizing on this potential, however, is contingent on both proponents and critics re-examining common assumptions about organizational replication and recognizing value in replication enterprises that they would otherwise miss.

Principals: Human Capital Managers at Every School

Principals must tie school improvement strategies to their work at recruiting, selecting, developing, and retaining effective teachers.

Education Improvement in Alberta

For the last 10 years, the province of Alberta has been engaged in a significant school improvement effort called the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI). Developed in 1999 through a collaborative process between the Alberta Department of Education and the key stakeholder groups (teachers, school boards, parents, and faculties of education), AISI is starting its fourth three-year cycle of grants and supports to school boards around school improvement. It's among the longest large-scale school improvement programs anywhere. In the AISI model, each school or district develops projects aimed at improving student learning (Alberta has about 60 school districts ranging from very small to quite large). The approach is very much bottom up; AISI defines some areas of interest and goals, but schools and districts define specific projects. The province reviews and funds projects for three years. Total AISI funding is quite modest at about $75 million per year across the province, or a little more than $100 per student (compared to about $10,000 per student per year in total spending in Alberta). An external review of AISI done by an international team of researchers confirms AISI's many strengths, as well as the limits that are partly inherent in using a bottom-up, schoolbased approach and partly common to almost all school improvement strategies. Among its strengths are the high level of commitment to AISI projects by teachers, principals and, often, students and parents. The review said: AISI constitutes a world-class and world-leading example of a systemwide educational strategy. This strategy ... inspires teachers and administrators. It enhances their professional growth and enthusiasm. AISI seeds new, research-informed practices within local communities then spreads them across districts and schools; and it diffuses existing knowledge as well as creating new knowledge. AISI projects meet with a high level of enthusiasm and are largely owned by those who implement them, as opposed to being seen as externally imposed. Given the requirement for educator commitment in any successful education initiative, approaches that build local involvement and learning have much to recommend them. Because every school and district in Alberta has been engaged in some form of school improvement for a decade, improvement work has become an accepted part of what schools do across the province. Although such a claim seems trivial, the reality is that many schools and school systems are focused on maintenance, and not on improvement, so this change in Alberta is significant. Limitations At the same time, the review suggests that AISI exhibits some of the same limitations found in other voluntary, school-based improvement efforts. One challenge is that the level of commitment and understanding of change among schools is highly variable. Some schools may not see the need to change, feeling that any shortcomings are primarily due to the limitations of students. The review found that high schools were much less likely than elementary schools to undertake substantive changes, a finding consistent with a large body of evidence on the challenges of improving high schools. Other schools may focus on changes that have little or no effect on student outcomes. Schools may decide to work on the wrong things--for example, the frequent desire in some schools to focus on improving attendance or behavior instead of improving instruction and engagement leading to better attendance and behavior. The review noted that: [some] sites use AISI funds to extend their already established principles and strategies. They do not use the funds to reflect critically upon goals and interventions that are already in place. AISI has been working gradually to encourage higher-yield strategies, but it remains a voluntary and school-driven approach. …

Internal leadership challenges of network participation

While networking is becoming an increasingly popular school improvement strategy with high levels of success, there is little research that shows the challenges school leaders face as they enter into these new relationships. This article supplements current literature by providing documentation and analysis of some internal leadership challenges—those between school leaders and their staffs and school communities—that emerged for administrators participating in a voluntary network in the UK. Our research showed that head teachers faced three types of challenges in these networks: contextual considerations for network involvement, building internal commitment and capacity for network participation, and balancing network activities with other school reform efforts. In spite of these challenges, our research suggests that networking can be learned and that the presence of a support system for network leaders may enhance the effectiveness and quality of participation for both individual schools and the network‐at‐large.

A Comparative Analysis of the Educational Priorities and Capacity of Rural School Districts

This article outlines a comparative analysis of three studies (one provincial, and two school division) that examined the congruence between the priorities of the Manitoba government's Kindergarten to Senior 4 (K-S4) Education Agenda for Student Success and priorities identified by stakeholders in a rural Manitoba (Canada) school division, as well as the capacity of the division to achieve them. Capacity was defined utilizing a model developed out of rural sociology termed entrepreneurial social infrastructure which includes three components for success: (1) Legitimization of Alternatives; (2) Diverse Networks; and (3) Resource Mobilization. The findings of the study suggest that (1) rural areas are dynamic and unique in their economic, social and demographic characteristics, and (2) that theoretical conceptualizations of how rural areas develop and/or thrive have yet to be refined, particularly as they relate to rural education. School reform efforts have a tendency to essentialize schooling across contexts, which provides many challenges to rural school divisions when they do not reflect local purposes, interests and/or capacities. A more localized and responsive conceptualization of school improvement strategies is therefore necessary, as well as research that is tailored to the particular needs of rural communities.

Assistance and Accountability in Externally Managed Schools: The Case of Edison Schools, Inc.

Edison Schools, Inc., is the largest and most visible among a growing number of Education Management Organizations that have entered into contracts to manage public schools, including both conventional and charter schools. Edison's approach to managing schools is comprehensive, and it distinguishes itself from most other school improvement strategies by simultaneously addressing both the resources and assistance provided to schools and the accountability systems under which school staff operate. In this article we explore the ways in which the assistance and resources provided by Edison (including diverse professional development opportunities, materials, technology, and other tools), as well as accountability mechanisms (such as monitoring and rewards), have translated into principal and teacher actions, and the factors that facilitated or constrained educators' efforts to implement the Edison design and improve teaching and learning. Drawing on data gathered from extensive interviews, observations, and document reviews collected during a four-year comprehensive study of Edison schools, we demonstrate how Edison intends to promote not only educators' capacity but also their motivation and opportunity to deliver high-quality instruction. We examine variation that occurs across schools as teachers and principals respond to these system-level efforts. In addition, we identify several important predictors of variation in implementation, including the strength of instructional leadership provided by the principal and the presence or absence of district-imposed constraints such as union contract rules.

Race, inequality and educational accountability: the irony of ‘No Child Left Behind’

The No Child Left Behind Act, the major education initiative of the Bush Administration, was intended to raise educational achievement and close the racial/ethnic achievement gap. Its strategies include focusing schools’ attention on raising test scores, mandating better qualified teachers and providing educational choice. Unfortunately, the complex requirements of the law have failed to achieve these goals, and have provoked a number of unintended negative consequences which frequently harm the students the law is most intended to help. Among these consequences are a narrowed curriculum, focused on the low‐level skills generally reflected on high stakes tests; inappropriate assessment of English language learners and students with special needs; and strong incentives to exclude low‐scoring students from school, so as to achieve test score targets. In addition, the law fails to address the pressing problems of unequal educational resources across schools serving wealthy and poor children and the shortage of well‐prepared teachers in high‐need schools. A policy that would live up to the law’s name would need to address these issues and reshape the law’s requirements to enable the use of assessments and school improvement strategies that support higher‐quality teaching and learning.

The Strategy Toolbox: A Ladder to Strategic Teaching

The Strategy Toolbox is a concrete model developed to increase the academic achievement of students through increased teacher knowledge and expertise in teaching strategies. It is intended for implementation by individual teachers who share their ideas, classroom applications, and reflections in a group setting as an overall strategy for school improvement. The model involves teachers in continual development of a repertoire of research-based strategies evaluated as consistently effective for helping students comprehend and compose text—with countless possibilities across content areas. Each strategy is described on an index card; cards can be regrouped and separated for illustrative purposes during instruction, and new cards can be added for new strategies. The toolbox provides scaffolding for teachers as they develop expertise in orchestrating the use of the strategies over time through a reflective cycle of continual practice. As teachers apply, validate, and add new strategies, the toolbox becomes an increasingly valuable reference tool for unlocking student learning.

Bringing Community Organizing into the School Reform Picture

Community organizing is growing in importance as a means of achieving and sustaining urban school reform. The authors identify eight distinct areas in which community organizing groups are connecting community capacity to school improvement. Leadership development and the production of social capital build community power to address issues of failing schools. The broadening of public accountability for school improvement creates the political will to improve schools in low-income neighborhoods. The resulting school improvement strategies enable stronger school/community connections, improved curriculum and instruction, and a positive school climate with the ultimate goal of achieving equity between schools in low-income and higher-income neighborhoods. Using data from case studies of five community organizing groups nationwide and focusing on the story of the Oakland Community Organizations’ small-schools campaign, the authors illustrate how members of low-and moderate-income communities are both demanding change and building the support and capacity for public school improvement.

Primary exclusions: are they rising?

Reducing the number of pupils excluded from school has formed part of the Government's strategy for school improvement in recent years. The study reported here was conducted within an inner‐city LEA. In their article, Sue Pavey, research in special education, and John Visser, senior fellow lecturer in special education, both of whom work in the School of Education at the University of Birmingham, question the veracity of collected data on exclusions relating to the primary sector. Furthermore, they suggest that findings from their study indicate that exclusions are considered ineffective for the pupils concerned and are seen as a last resort by primary headteachers. More effective strategies for meeting the pupils' needs, argue Sue Pavey and John Visser, lie within enhanced, in‐school support services and multi‐agency approaches. The authors conclude that statistics on exclusion do not give a representative picture of real levels of exclusion in the LEA. This situation adversely affects strategic planning and the distribution of resources. In concluding their article, Sue Pavey and John Visser propose that resources should be spent on developing alternative strategies to exclusion and methods of identifying children at risk of disaffection.