Restructuring And Quality Issues For Tomorrow S Schools

The restructuring of schools systems across the world has been controversial. Have reforms been driven by a desire to cut educational budgets or the need to improve the quality of educational provision? This book explores the restructuring movement, with a particular emphasis on how decentralisation of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational reform.

The restructuring of schools systems across the world has been controversial. Have reforms been driven by a desire to cut educational budgets or the need to improve the quality of educational provision? This book explores the restructuring movement, with a particular emphasis on how decentralisation of power has affected the quality of education. It provides a broad and international picture of educational reform.

This book provides an introduction to and analysis of the restructuring of schools. It includes detailed case-study material and offers practical solutions to the problems of understanding and managing restructuring.

Does an effective school really come about through the actions of teachers and school leaders, or does it also require an advantaged student intake? This question reflects a longstanding research debate about whether or not the social class mix of a school's student intake has much effect on individual achievement. Schools Making a Difference: Let's Be Realistic! presents new evidence which suggests that school mix is likely to be important because of the way many school processes are deeply influenced by student intake characteristics. Low socioeconomic schools face numerous intake-related constraints which make them highly resistant to improvement efforts. By suggesting that 'failing' schools are often overwhelmed rather than ineffective, this book provides a sympathetic reappraisal of the performance of teachers and school leaders in such schools. It also offers a critical response to the often unrealistic claims of the school effectiveness and school improvement movement and a fresh critique of market reforms in education.

Interest in complexity theory, a relation of chaos theory, has become well established in the business community in recent years. Complexity theory argues that systems are complex interactions of many parts which cannot be predicted by accepted linear equations. In this book, Keith Morrison introduces complexity theory to the world of education, drawing out its implications for school leadership. He suggests that schools are complex, nonlinear and unpredictable systems, and that this impacts significantly within them. As schools race to keep up with change and innovation, he suggests that it is possible to find order without control and to lead without coercion. Key areas: * schools and self-organisation * leadership for self-organisation * supporting emergence through the learning organisation * schools and their environments * communication * fitness landscapes This book will be of interest to headteachers and middle managers, and those on higher level courses in educational leadership and management.

Nick Adnett and Peter Davies develop an economic analysis of schooling markets, emphasizing both the strengths and weaknesses of orthodox analyses. They explain the economic and social contexts that have generated the widespread desire to reform state schooling and develop a systematic analysis of the key policy components examining both theory and international evidence. The authors employ a unique framework based upon economic analysis that is informed by research performed by educationalists and other social scientists. Markets for Schooling is designed to be accessible and of interest to all researchers, administrators and policy-makers concerned with education and economics.

A provocative and authoritative compendium of writings on leadership in education from distinguished scholar-educators worldwide. What is educational leadership? What are some of the trends, questions, and social forces most relevant to the current state of education? What are the possible futures of education, and what can educational leadership contribute to these futures? To address these questions, and more, editors Duncan Waite and Ira Bogotch asked distinguished international thought leaders on education to share their insights, observations, and research findings on the nature of education and educational leadership in the global village. The Wiley International Handbook of Educational Leadership brings together contributions from authors in twenty-one countries, spanning six continents. Topics examined include leadership and aesthetics, creativity, eco‐justice, advocacy, Big Data and technology, neoliberalism, emerging philosophies and theories, critical democracy, gender and radical feminism, political economies, emotions, postcolonialism, and new directions in higher education. A must-read for teachers, researchers, scholars, and policy makers, this Handbook: Champions radical pluralism over consensus and pseudoscientific or political solutions to problems in education Embraces social, economic, and political relevance alongside the traditions of careful and systematic rigor Challenges traditional epistemological, cultural, and methodological concepts of education and educational leadership Explores the field’s historical antecedents and ways in which leadership can transcend the narrow disciplinary and bureaucratic constraints imposed by current research designs and methods Advances radically new possibilities for remaking educational leadership research and educational institutions

Teachers in primary schools deal with a wide range of issues every day. This book helps teachers to understand those issues, and how they fit in with recent government policies and initiatives. Each chapter looks at: * relevant statements of policy or initiative * how these statements fit into the context of specific schools * the challenges they present for those involved in schools * how schools can respond to these challenges * learning across contexts Each chapter has been written by one practitioner and one academic and between them the chapters cover the whole range of Australian primary schools.