School Effectiveness And School Based Management

The aim of this book is to bridge the widening gap between ongoing educational reforms and the lack of advances in knowledge, research and practice. Included is a description of new mechanisms in fields such as leadership, staff development and curriculum change.

This book explores the connections between school-based management, school effectiveness and school improvement, bringing together studies completed in Australia and New Zealand, Canada, the UK and the USA. It describes and analyses how effective principals and teachers perceive and undertake educational change and school-based management; how a sense of values, vision and school culture can improve leadership; ways in whcih delegating financial management to schools may lead to improved teaching and learning; and the contribution made by school development planning through reviews and evaluation to school improvement. Finally, it suggests future directions for study and research in school effectiveness, school improvement and school-based management.

This new edition of an internationally renowned classic book provides a new comprehensive framework of latest perspectives and findings, fills gaps in the ongoing research, policy and practice, and re-engineers a school-based mechanism for understanding and managing school-based development initiatives. The book addresses the burning issues about how school-based management (SBM) and school effectiveness should be related to the new paradigm in education and the third wave of education reforms worldwide. The book includes four parts and 12 chapters covering (1) School Effectiveness (i.e., multiple school functions, models of effectiveness and pursuit of dynamic effectiveness); (2) SBM (i.e., theories of SBM, multi-level self-management (SM), and its implementation); (3) Leadership for Change (i.e., leadership for SBM, staff development, school-based change, and curriculum change); and (4) Future Developments (i.e., an SBM mechanism for effectiveness and paradigm shift towards the third wave). The framework and related analysis will benefit the understanding, policy formulation, school practice and research of the key stakeholders including policy makers, educators, change agents, researchers and those concerned in facing the challenges from the ongoing education reforms in different parts of the world.

The aim of this book is to bridge the widening gap between ongoing educational reforms and the lack of advances in knowledge, research and practice. Included is a description of new mechanisms in fields such as leadership, staff development and curriculum change.

"Mohrman and Wohlstetter have written the most important volume on school-based management to date... a significant contribution to the school reform literature." --Joseph Murphy, professor and chair, department of educational leadership, Vanderbilt UniversityThis book examines the school-based management strategies that hold the most promise for increasing organizational effectiveness.

This book begins with a review of 'decentralisation' in schools, highlighting the problem of how to increase school-level autonomy while ensuring an orderly delivery of high quality education for a whole country that is equitable across geographic, socioeconomic and cultural divisions. Case studies of school-based managed models in six countries are described, focusing on a radical system in place in Victoria, Australia. Leadership is a key function in school management reform, especially with respect to the delegation of financial management.

This volume reviews the research in the field of school effectiveness and improvement. Many key questions are examined, such as different methods for assessing school effectiveness and variations in examination attainment in schools. It draws together the funding of the programmes of improvement being implemented in schools and provides practical discussion of effective school practice and its direct implications in schools. It is aimed at teachers, student teachers, administrators and advisors. The contributors are: Bill Badger, Louise S. Balkey, Bert P.M. Creemers, Carol T. Fitz-Gibbon, Anthony F. Heath, Daniel V. Levine, Peter Mortimore, Joseph Murphy.

The disciplines of school effectiveness research and school improvement practice and research have been apart for too long. This book is the first major attempt, by leading writers and practitioners in these fields, to bring the areas together in a coherent way. Existing knowledge about the characteristics of `good' schools is outlined, together with the knowledge base about how to `make schools good schools'. The book also makes an entirely original contribution to re-thinking practice in school improvement that can revolutionise our thinking in the late 1990s, and which can be of use to academics, to policymakers and to the practitioners which much existing work has neglected.