Beginning with a discussion of the latest findings in the information and communication technologies (ICT) and educational improvement field, this article develops a comprehensive strategy to analyse online community building. Far from offering a utopian or dystopian vision, we study the contribution of ICT appropriation as a tool for…

This article introduces the guiding principles of sustainable education. It starts from the observation that many education systems around the world have launched ambitious programs aiming to raise academic standards and to reconcile concerns for excellence with concerns for equity. However, many of these programs have failed to reach their…

The implementation of standards-based accountability (SBA) interventions aimed at improving school performance often focuses on the testing component, at the expense of capacity building. This was the case in South Africa when a SBA programme was instituted by government in 2000, which was accompanied by substantial rises in senior certificate…

School quality care has become important in many Western countries. A number of self-evaluation instruments have been developed in response. The goal of these instruments is improving the quality of education. One such system, ZEBO, was developed for performing quality assessment in Dutch primary schools. The use of this self-evaluation instrument…

Van Houtte (2005) called for clarification of the terms "school culture" and "school climate" and the role of each in school effectiveness research. This article presents a theoretical framework for school culture that asserts that it is a context-specific branch of organizational culture comprised of 4 dimensions and 3 levels. This…

The dynamic model does not only refer to different effectiveness factors and groupings of factors operating at different levels but also supports that each factor can be defined and measured using 5 dimensions: frequency, focus, stage, quality, and differentiation. The importance of taking each dimension into account is raised in this paper.…

In this paper, I consider the importance of the work of Bert Creemers to my own work and the field of educational effectiveness. In particular, the field needs to take heed of 3 key lessons from Bert Creemers' work: the importance of an empirical and sceptical stance focussed on what actually works in education, the primacy of the classroom level…

This paper tries to depict important elements of the professional career of Bert P.M. Creemers. Starting from his early work on teaching styles and its effects on students' initial reading, it is shown that there are consistent patterns in his work. These come to the fore in his widely cited "The Effective Classroom" (1994) but also in the many…

The purpose of this article is to improve our understanding of data-driven decision-making strategies that are initiated at the district or system level. We apply principal-agent theory to the analysis of qualitative data gathered in a case study of 4 urban school systems. Our findings suggest educators at the school level need not only systemic…

This article outlines a research and development programme that focused on a group of 8 secondary schools in England. The schools in this study were considered to be facing exceptionally challenging circumstances characterised by high levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and deprivation. They were also schools considered to be seriously…

The proportion of low-achieving children in a class can affect the progress of individual pupils in that class. Having a large proportion of low achievers in a class could slow down growth in cognitive achievement but, might also boost such growth, due to the effects of specialist teaching geared to low achievers' needs. In a longitudinal study of…

School effectiveness research (SER) has flourished since the 1980s. In recent years, however, various authors have criticised several aspects of SER. A thorough review of recent criticism can serve as a good starting point for addressing the flaws of SER, where appropriate, thereby supporting its further development. This article begins by…

Research into teacher effectiveness has traditionally attempted to uncover generic characteristics of effective teachers. However, recently the realisation that teacher effectiveness may be differentiated across different domains has gained recognition. In this article, we propose that researchers and policy-makers develop more differentiated…

Comprehensive school reform (CSR) projects are being funded throughout the United States in a determined effort to improve the performance of public education. The multidimensional nature of comprehensive school reform presents unique challenges for explaining widely discrepant outcomes among schools. These challenges are addressed in a study of 8…

This article suggests a method for analyzing patterns of school practice for improvement purposes. In particular it describes outcomes of a study that point to some promising possibilities, in terms of encouraging teachers to reflect on their practice, for the purpose of improvement. It argues that by discussing and analyzing vignettes, teachers…