The importance of establishing positive relationships is a common theme in educational philosophies and recommended practice. Educators inherently believe this to be true. It is assumed relationships are the key to academic and behavioral success, as well as students' social emotional well-being. Furthermore, relationships may even be the key to…

Elementary school students face developmental challenges resulting in decreased social and emotional learning and academic success. These challenges include outbursts in class, physical confrontations, or low motivation that will cause students to lose focus and fail academically. This research explored teachers' perceptions about the efficacy of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among collective efficacy factors, as measured by the Illinois 5Essentials Survey, and college readiness scores, as reported by American College Testing (ACT), for high schools in the state of Illinois. The 5Essentials have been considered crucial to school success and therefore used to…

Learning for all students is the most fundamental and noble quest of American public schools. As new educational research presents best practice, this seemingly simplistic goal has become a multifaceted and complicated challenge for school districts. Classroom hierarchies based solely on grade point average are disappearing, replaced by an…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted every aspect of education in the state and across the nation, irrevocably impacting the lives of students, families, and educators like no crisis before it. Educators, families, and leaders responded to the crisis with extraordinary resilience. In the face of an unprecedented threat to public health, the state…

This qualitative inquiry investigated the perceptions of the roles of school board presidents and superintendents with regard to governance and administration in select Chicago, Illinois, Suburban School Districts. The selection criteria were school board presidents and school superintendents who hold these positions in several Chicago, Illinois,…

This study explored whether and to what extent Ogbu and Fordham's Oppositional Culture Theory applied to African American high school students at one Midwestern suburban high school. Based on multiple interviews with six African American students, the study found support for some aspects of the theory but not for others.

Several social-emotional learning (SEL) or social-emotional and character development (SECD) programs have been shown to be effective at improving SEL/SECD skills, and some have also provided evidence of effectiveness in improving student behavior and academic achievement (Durlak, Weissberg, Dymnicki, Taylor, & Schellinger, 2011). Very few SEL…

I examine several potential explanations for recent evidence showing a lack of improvement in the academic achievement of children participating in several poverty reduction residential mobility programs. Detailed interviews and field notes about the relocation and school experiences of 80 children in the Gautreaux II residential mobility program…

This research study explored the critical nature of the connection between student achievement and superintendent leadership. A great deal of scholarship has addressed either student achievement or leadership and previous evidence has suggested the impact of both parental education and racioethnicity on student achievement, but few studies have…

This study positioned the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2002 as a reified colonizing entity, inscribing its hegemonic authority upon the professional identity and work of school principals within their school communities of practice. Pressure on educators and students intensifies each year as the benchmark for Adequate Yearly Progress…

Analyses of data from the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) show how strongly associated the socioeconomic characteristics of schools are with school outcomes. Factors such as the percentage of students who are poor, percentage black, and the property values within a district explain over 70% of the variance in school outcomes. However,…

Explores the effects of community values on Highland Park High School's strong emphasis on academic achievement. The author concludes that high achievers benefit from this approach while mediocre or nonacademically inclined students are neglected. For journal availability, see SO 509 295. (AM)

This is the 2011 Yearbook of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA). This Yearbook contains five parts. Part I, Invited Chapters, includes: (1) NCPEA President's Message, 2011 (Gary W. Kinsey); (2) Shadows and Images II (Lloyd Duvall); and (3) Micropolitics in the School: Teacher Leaders' Use of Political Skill…

Project EXCITE was developed and implemented specifically to raise the achievement of gifted minority students in a large suburban school district of Chicago so that they could qualify for advanced programs and accelerated tracks in high school in mathematics and science. This paper describes the goals, components, eligibility, and selection…