Evaluating the Impact of a Raising School Standards Initiative
Concern about the quality of schooling in disadvantaged urban areas has been especially marked throughout the United Kingdom during the 1990s. This led to the instigation of a major school improvement project in Northern Ireland, known as the Raising School Standards Initiative, that was intended to help schools address significant disadvantage and under-achievement amongst their pupils. The project, based on the knowledge base of the school effectiveness tradition, was designed to target a small number of secondary schools and their main contributory primary schools. The project sought to improve the quality of school management, the pupils’ standards of literacy and numeracy, the levels of qualifications, links with local industry, parental involvement in schools, attendance and punctuality, and to deal with problems of discipline in class. The improvement strategy selected can be seen as an attempt to integrate a ‘top down’ external approach (distal) with a ‘bottom up’ (proximal) strategy developed within individual schools. This chapter describes selected aspects of the full evaluation: the launch and selection of schools and the process of ‘action planning’. It also looks at the impact of the project on management, teaching and learning and educational standards. It concludes with findings which will have implications for other initiatives which seek to raise school standards in the urban context.
Comparison of Value Added Models for Secondary School Effectiveness
ABSTRACT The issue of value‐added measures of school effectiveness is reviewed in relation to the Government's requirement for schools to publish raw examination results. The study reports a series of multilevel analyses of the 1993 GCSE examination results in Lancashire employing a wide variety of pupil intake and school context variables as well as a range of 1991 Census measures attached to each school's catchment area and each pupil's home area. The methodology involves evaluating and comparing the results of several different value‐added models controlling for different pupil and school background factors. The findings indicate that a substantial percentage of school level variation in pupil outcomes can be explained by pupil intake factors. In addition, comparisons between the different value‐added models indicate that when rich and wide‐ranging pupil level data (for example, prior attainment measures in different areas) are available and taken into account in the analysis, school‐context factors (s...
Marketing the mpa degree: Access and program structure as determinants of successful enrollments
During the months of October through December of 1982, a national comparative evaluation of 186 MPA programs was undertaken to determine which variables are associated with enrollment strength across these programs. Two sets of variables, one corresponding to the structural characteristics of the program, the other corresponding to measures of access for these programs, were statistically analyzed. The findings are as follows: (1) the highest enrollments are determined by access to a market population and whether or not the program was located in a school of public administration; (2) there is a fundamental difference between programs oriented towards full-time students and those oriented towards part-time students; (3) full-time oriented program enrollments are dependent on structured characteristics of a program while part-time oriented programs are sensitive to access variables and not program characteristics and; (4) larger enrollments are associated with organizational autonomy with the lowest enroll...