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.
A Multilevel Analysis of School Examination Results
Data on examination results from inner London schools are analysed in relation to intake achievement, pupil gender and school type. The examination achieve- ment, averaged over subjects, is studied as is achievement in the separate subjects of mathematics and English. Multilevel models are fitted, so that the variation between schools can be studied. It is shown that confidence intervals for school 'residuals' or 'effects' are wide, so that few schools can be separated reliably. In particular, no fine rank ordering of schools legitimately can be produced. A bivariate model for mathematics and English examination achievement scores is fitted. The student level variance for both subjects is shown to increase from the lowest to the highest intake achievement group, with moderately high correlation between the subjects. The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the publication of 'league tables' of school examination and test scores.
The analysis of longitudinal, multilevel data
Abstract School effects are dynamic effects which occur within multilevel, hierarchical organizational structures. Their dynamic character is essential both because school effects modify children's growth and because the schools that produce them are changing. Their multilevel, hierarchical character is crucial because such effects occur only when policies and practices implemented at the school level affect learning measured at the pupil level. Nevertheless, quantitative research on the effects of schools has rarely reflected these two key characteristics. Because of recent advances in statistical methods, however, it is now possible to combine longitudinal and multilevel designs in ways that prove extremely revealing about the importance and stability of school effects. This chapter presents two examples from recent research which illustrate the potential for new insights from such studies.