One day a teacher writes 12 = ___ + ___ on the board. "You wrote it wrong," says one of the 1st graders. "You can't write the answer first!" exclaims another. As teachers in classrooms across the United States put the new mathematics standards into practice, they'll face countless examples like this one. When teachers…

As standardized assessments tied to the Common Core standards approach for K-12 students, U.S. teachers correctly feel that how we test students will change. Will students be ready for tests of proficiency done on computers? Gullen debriefed with 500 students in various grades who had just taken pilot assessment items connected to the coming…

This nonexperimental survey research investigated whether enrollment, location, expenditures, percentage of free and reduced lunch and percentage of minority students influenced Georgia's superintendent and board chairperson satisfaction. In addition, this study investigated whether respondents' satisfaction could predict student…

McNamee and Chen describe the Bridging assessment system they developed to measure performance on specific learning tasks for pre-K through 3rd-grade students. Bridging assesses an individual student's skill level on learning tasks in five curricular areas: language arts and literacy, visual arts, mathematics, science, and performing arts. The…

School boards are expected to monitor and enhance the educational quality of their schools. To know whether and how school boards are able to do so, we first of all need to know whether school boards are aware of the educational quality of their schools in the first place. Taking Dutch school boards in primary education as an exemplary case (N =…

The development of emotional intelligence skills offers sufficient leadership qualities for advancing the organization and for achieving its objectives. In particular, the emotionally intelligent leader--principal is able to inspire and facilitate a self-conscious and organizational culture by adopting the values of understanding, trust, prospect,…

Emotional intelligence (EI) has been an emerging topic for educational, psychological and management researchers and consultants in recent years. Despite the emerging consensus of its definition and evidence reported in business organizations, relatively little empirical evidence have been reported in the education literature. We conducted two…

Free primary education (FPE) is widely assumed to be required to ensure that the poor gain enrolment. After the introduction of FPE (from January 2003) in Kenyan schools, huge increases in enrolment were officially reported. However, our research, conducted 10 months after the introduction of FPE in and around the informal settlement of Kibera,…

This is the first article to analyse and evaluate Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) reports on attendance issues within local authorities. A full cohort of Ofsted reports on local education authorities (LEAs) undertaken in 2003 in England were read, evaluated and used in the preparation of this article. The reports show that most LEAs…

This article draws on a Norwegian project--in one primary and one lower secondary school--that had the aim of creating a shared understanding of classroom management and that resulted in a handbook on classroom management at each of these schools. Teacher reflection and teacher sharing were vital in this project initiated from the outside yet…

The purpose of this study was to validate the instrument, Administrator Dispositions Index (ADI), that measures the dispositions of effective school leaders. The ADI could be used to assess administrator candidate dispositions and to integrate dispositions of effective school leaders into the curricula of administrator preparation programs.…