"New" school inspections are essential parts of "evidence-based governance" concepts and have been implemented by many European countries as a major strategy to assure and improve the effectiveness and quality of their education systems. However, national inspection systems vary in their composition and in their contextual…

The effects of teachers' group incentives on student achievement are examined by reviewing theoretical arguments and empirical studies published between 1990 and 2011. Studies from developing countries reported positive effects of group incentives on student test scores. However, experimental studies from developed countries reported…

There have been appeals within the educational change (EC) and school improvement (SI) literature for research to explore more non-westernized and developing country contexts (Dimmock, 2000; Harris, 2009; Harris & Chrispeels, 2006; McMahon, 2006). This article is a response to those appeals. The study maps the SI educational policy contexts of…

This study adopted a quantitative methodology involving a matched sample of federated and non-federated schools and utilising multilevel modelling techniques to explore the impact of federations on student outcomes. The sample involves a total of 50 school districts and 264 schools. These are grouped into 122 federations; 264 comparator schools…

A brief 15-item version of the California School Climate Scale (Brief-CSCS) is presented to fill a need for a measure that could be used for periodic monitoring of school personnel's general perception of the climate of their school campus. From a sample of 81,261 California school personnel, random subsamples of 2,400 teachers and 2,400…

Few studies with respect to grade retention and school-disruptive behavior have focused on adolescence. Moreover, previous retention research has ignored multilevel issues. This study aims to fill these research lacunae by addressing the role of grade retention in adolescent students' school misconduct. Furthermore, we explore the role of the…

From an international review of 109 school effectiveness research studies, only 6 could be seen as theory driven. As the border between substantive conceptual models of educational effectiveness and theory-based models is not always very sharp, this number might be increased to 11 by including those studies that are based on models that make…

This article summarises findings from systematic reviews of research on primary and secondary mathematics, primary and secondary reading, and programmes for struggling readers. All reviews used a common set of procedures, requiring comparisons with control groups and duration of at least 12 weeks. Across hundreds of qualifying studies, a clear…

This article addresses an issue that has not been well explored in empirical research, namely whether local education agencies (districts) have an impact on student learning. We assumed that local district effects on learning would be largely indirect, mediated by how teachers work together in schools (in professional communities) and the quality…

In the United States, effective data use is proving to be a vexing problem. In response, scholars have recently begun viewing this as a systemic problem, believing there are actions a school district may take to make data use more efficient and tenable throughout the organization. In this article, we add to the knowledge of how school…

School inspections are expected to have an impact on data use and improvement of schools. Schools are expected to generate data (e.g., self-evaluation reports and student achievement results) as part of the inspection process. This process, in turn, also generates data (e.g., inspection reports) for school improvement. The high-stakes context in…

This study examines the impact of macro-context factors on the behavior of school principals. More specifically, the article illuminates how a nation's level of economic development, societal culture, and educational system influence the amount of time principals devote to their job role and shape their allocation of time to instructional…

In recent years, the Western discourse on distributed leadership has attracted increased attention in Chinese societies that have traditionally relied on highly centralized administrative systems in which power is located in the person of the school principal or other unit leader. This article explores the implications of applying the concept of…

This article reviews the literature on Chinese principalship written in English and Chinese between 1998 and 2008. The first sections discuss the rationale for the research, the review process, and the state of education research in mainland China. The review findings are presented as a set of core patterns and contributory subpatterns, which flow…

Districts are an important unit for administrative purposes, but they vary little in their impact on students' attainment, at least in the UK. Further, government attempts to raise attainment are often disappointing. The project described in this article aimed to engage schools in reform to change students' attainment and attitudes in schools…