Success in a PK-12 educational environment begins at the top with school leadership. Due to economic problems, poverty and added responsibilities, leaders in rural communities throughout the United States face sensitive and distinctive challenges. Based on research and years of administrative experience as school and school system leaders, the…

Data Based Decision Making (DBDM), the process of gathering, analyzing, applying, and sharing data in order to promote school improvement, has recently become a prominent process in the quest to assist students in attaining educational success and helping schools meet accountability benchmarks (Wayman, 2005; Poynton & Carey, 2006). This manuscript…

Since its election in 1997 the Labour government's policy has sought to promote a "new professionalism" amongst teachers. First mooted at the time when new performance management arrangements were introduced, the discourse of new professionalism has now become closely associated with the "workforce remodeling" agenda in which teachers' work is…

One-third of all U.S. school children attend school in rural settings. Rural schools are much poorer than urban America, with most of the poorest counties in the United States located in rural areas. Equity is a concern not only in terms of race, class, gender, disability, and sexual orientation, but also in terms of being geographically located…

The School Improvement Grants Program is a British Columbia-based action research project to support efforts to raise literacy and math skills in public schools serving low-socioeconomic status neighborhoods. The program--which provides $25,000 in planning and implementation grants for each participating school over 2.5 years--began in 2001 and…

This paper critiques instructional leadership and the notion of pedagogic leadership is proposed as an alternative, broader conception of the principalship. Pedagogy concerns enabling the learning and intellectual growth of students in contrast to instruction that treats students as the object of curriculum implementation. Successful classroom…

Accountability has become synonymous with standardized testing in many Western countries such as Canada, the United States, Great Britain and New Zealand. Schools and districts are increasingly ranked based on their students' performance on standardized tests. Unfortunately, standardized testing measures possess a number of limitations that…

The ability to work collaboratively with others is becoming an essential component of contemporary school reform. This article reviews current trends in school reform that embody collaborative principles and also draws on the literature to provide a theoretical overview of collaboration itself. The article then outlines the findings from a…