A goal in many countries is to institute state-wide exams to base student assessment more firmly on norms for all classes. This raises the question as to the extent to which greater standardization of grading practice can be reached by implementing state-wide exit exams. Since there is a lack of longitudinal studies, we analyzed the effect of the…

The main objective of this study was to quantify the impact of failing to account for measurement error on school compositional effects. Multilevel structural equation models were incorporated to control for measurement error and/or sampling error. Study 1, a large sample of English primary students in Years 1 and 4, revealed a significantly…

"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 Chilean education system is an emblematic case of school management privatization, with the majority of schools operating under government funding, but private administration. This article addresses the incidence of this dimension on school leadership, showing the differences and continuities established among primary school principals in the…

This study uses a school-level longitudinal control-group design to examine how teachers and principals of inspected versus uninspected schools perceive school improvement at their schools. During the phasing in of school inspections in the states of Berlin and Brandenburg (Germany), both inspected and uninspected schools were surveyed with…

There is a general doubt on whether teacher evaluation can contribute to teachers' professional development. Recently, standards-based teacher evaluation has been introduced in many countries to improve teaching practice. This study wants to investigate which teacher evaluation procedural, leadership, and teacher characteristics can stimulate…

This paper examines the relationship of the policies and practices employed by 3 high school reform models--Early College High Schools, Redesigned High Schools, and High Schools That Work--with student success in college preparatory mathematics courses by the end of the 10th grade. Data on policies and practices collected through a survey of…

The learning gains in reading of students in 57 classrooms in special primary education doubled as a result of implementing the Reading Impulse in Special Education (RISE) programme. Raising the scheduled reading time with 1.5 hr in all classrooms and implementing standards-based teaching characterised by "monitoring of pupil progress",…

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…

This article aims to explain the role principals play in the variation in academic achievement between secondary schools in Hong Kong. The article draws on survey data from 179 key staff and 2,037 students from 42 schools. The study uses 2 analytical approaches. First, it employs classification and regression tree analysis (CART). This was used to…

Using national data from the 2007-08 School and Staffing Survey, we compared the relationships between parental involvement and school outcomes related to adequate yearly progress (AYP) in urban, suburban, and rural schools. Parent-initiated parental involvement demonstrated significantly positive relationships with both making AYP and staying off…

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…

Teaching quality has been observed in large representative samples from Flanders (Belgium), Lower Saxony (Germany), the Slovak Republic, and The Netherlands. This study reveals that measures of "creating a safe and stimulating climate", "clear and activating instruction", and "teaching learning strategies" were…

Teachers spend most of their time in school in classrooms, and their instruction and teaching practices may be affected by classroom context such as class size. We examine whether teacher effects interact with classroom context such as class size. Specifically, we seek to determine whether teacher effects are more pronounced in small classes than…

Living in a single-parent family is negatively related with children's educational performance compared to living with 2 biological parents. In this article, we aim to find out to what extent the context of the school's share of single-parent families affects this negative relationship. We use pooled data from the Organisation for…