The Academic Performance Index is the centerpiece of California's Public School Accountability System and the new measuring stick for state schools. Principals can use the API as a diagnostic tool to provide information specific to their schools and highly relative to economically and socially similar schools. (MLH)

Staff at the Cucamonga (California) School District discovered no magic key to improving mediocre student performance in their schools. Academic gains became evident only after implementing several steady-improvement strategies in teaching, instructional technologies, learning focus, libraries, remedial reading, and summer school. (MLH)

In one California high school, learning to learn is a measurable outcome assessed by all students' participation in graduation by exhibition. Students must meet state requirements and demonstrate learning prowess by publicly exhibiting their skills in math, science, language arts, social science, service learning, and postgraduation planning. (MLH)

California holds special-education students accountable for statewide assessments, district content and performance standards, and the general-education core curriculum. Key performance indicators provide concrete data to the state and help schools demonstrate whether all their students are achieving. The Centralia District's reading…

This article considers the relationship between distributed leadership and school improvement. Drawing upon empirical evidence from two contemporary studies of successful school leadership and recent studies of school improvement, it explores the extent to which distributed forms of leadership can contribute to school improvement. The article…

This article reports on the introduction of performance-related pay (PRP) in schools in Wales. Specifically, it evaluates the attitudes of teachers to PRP by means of a large-scale questionnaire survey. The results suggest a strong antipathy to PRP for school teachers on the basis that it would be divisive and difficult to implement. In…

This was a descriptive survey involving four South African higher education (HE) institutions. Specifically, the study sought to critically investigate factors that could explain enrolment patterns in universities and technikons. The findings indicated that the choices of the institutions were mainly made by the respondents themselves, based on…

This article uses research commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills to investigate the operation of teacher capability procedures in England. The article examines the role of local education authorities (LEAs) in supporting headteachers and governors in dealing with underperformance by giving support outside of capability procedures…

Recent policy developments are changing the work of local education authorities (LEAs) in Wales requiring them to play a broader role in the community and a significant role in raising educational achievement. LEAs are obligated to set out their improvement targets in institutional plans and are called to account by external inspection, which…

During a multi-district study on part-time teaching employment, part-time teachers, school administrators, and teachers' association officials spoke about a range of micropolitical activities related to part-time teaching arrangements as a component of flexible workforces and as an element of flexible workplaces. The study was conducted in one…

Despite the possibility of poor teacher performance causing damage to pupils and to a school's reputation, the subject has rarely been studied. This article examines, within the Israeli context, who the poor performing (referred as "challenging") teachers are. Based on interviews with 40 elementary school principals, over 7 percent of staff…

In the light of central government rhetoric of partnerships in educational provision, and the recent redefinition of schools' relationships with local authorities, this article explores the perceptions of six chief education officers of the formal relationships that currently exist between them. The CEOs interviewed were drawn from different types…

When co-principalships were initiated in Aotearoa/New Zealand during the 1990s, they encountered a range of issues around this country's new public management requirements for market, managerial and split governance/management accountabilities. This article draws on a case study of one initiative to discuss how elements of these requirements were…

This article provides a response to the previous papers. It sets out a descriptive overview of the National College for School Leadership and then discusses issues of: scale; on-the-job learning; innovation as technological and networking; start-up organizations; leadership effects; international awareness; evaluating leadership and impact. The…

This article reviews three historical phases of leadership development in England and Wales, together with parallel changes in in-service training and the broader professional infrastructure, in order to show how the idea of a national college developed and became viable. It argues that, as a policy innovation, the NCSL has built on earlier…