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.
Investigating the Quality and Equity Dimensions: A Critical Review of Literature on Educational Effectiveness
In this chapter, we provide a review of research investigating quality and equity in education within the field of EER. Looking at the history of EER, we see four sequential phases in the field which address different types of research questions and promote the theoretical development of EER. The second part of the chapter refers to methodological developments in the field of EER and to the progress that has been made in modelling educational effectiveness. It is shown that much of the progress in EER has been due to advances in methodology made during the last 30 years which have mainly been concerned with measuring the effectiveness status of schools in terms of the quality dimension and seeking to identify factors associated with student achievement gains. As a consequence, EER has gradually moved on to placing more emphasis on the quality dimension, arguing that by promoting quality, equity may also be achieved. During the last two decades, there has been an emphasis on investigating differential teacher and school effectiveness, but this has mainly been done in order to examine the generic nature of effectiveness factors rather than to identify factors associated with equity. It is therefore argued that EER should develop a theoretical framework and appropriate methodological tools to address equity and its relationship with quality.
Multilevel Modelling in an Indicator System
Purposes and practical considerations enter into choices of statistical analysis methods. This paper considers the application of multilevel modelling to data from a Performance Monitoring system in the United Kingdom known as the A-level Information System (ALIS). The practical question concerned the extent to which it was important to use this more sophisticated model rather than simply using standard OLS regressions, given the kind of data dealt with in this particular monitoring system. We begin with a consideration of dependent variables (outcome indicators) and present an example of their apparent relationship to a process variable. The example is a springboard for a brief discussion of the purpose of a monitoring system. The results of applying ML 2 2 to the analysis of four dependent variables are then presented. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limitations of the data and an attempt to assess the role of multilevel modelling for this particular indicator system. Finally, a suggestion is made that a desirable piece of statistical software might be one delivering rapid-fire graphical bootstrapping.