Academic press constitutes the schoolwide environmental forces pressing for student achievement, including school policies, practices, expectations, norms, and rewards. This article shows how academic press is created and how high expectations are communicated to students. (Author/JM)

Research indicates that good discipline is a melting pot of positive factors including, among other things, high rates of student success and strong principal leadership. (Author/JM)

Describes a program at Kishwaukee Elementary School in Rockford (Illinois) designed to improve the effectiveness of this inner-city school. (Author/JM)

Describes a school improvement program and the reasons for its successes and failures. (JM)

This superintendent-mandated school improvement program has improved test scores and brought about teacher, student, and parent support for participating junior high schools. (Author)

Describes the results of a study of three programs successfully teaching basic skills. Characteristics of successful schools include careful alignment of curriculum and instruction and grade-level instructional planning. (Author/JM)

Of more importance than any lofty concept of the principal's leadership are crucial, mundane, support functions--which can be carried out by supervisors and teachers as well as by principals. (Author)

A study reveals that high school teachers are less likely than their elementary counterparts to share a common purpose. Elementary principals have more opportunity than high school principals do to be instructional leaders. (Author/JM)

Computer simulation makes it possible for researchers to test the potential effects of alternative school improvement policies. (Author)

Without more unanimity about which characteristics contribute to a school's effectiveness, it is difficult to know which characteristics to use as a focus for improvement. (Author/JM)

Examines some problems with school effectiveness research, including small samples, indentification error, and inappropriate comparisons. Nevertheless, the article concludes that characteristics of effective schools can be useful in school improvement as long as facile solutions are avoided in favor of incremental long-term cultural change.…

Teachers are more like orchestra conductors than technicians. They need rules of thumb and educational imagination, not scientific prescriptions. (Author)

Patience, caring, listening, intuition, and the elements in nature--these are the raw materials of organic teaching and learning. (Author)

Noting the similarities between growth-inducing educational experiences and emotionally meaningful aesthetic experiences can help us understand teaching as art. (Author)

Because most of the people who teach our children in the public schools are women, we must ask whether there are particular conditions surrounding women's lives that will influence our capacity to take up and live out an aesthetic approach to our work in the classroom. (Author)