This is the most comprehensive School Development overview text ever written. In the first part of the book, Dalin sets the stage for a discussion of how schools can improve in the 21st century by providing a detailed historical review of reform in Europe and North America. He explores the dilemmas faced by decision-makers facing up to pressure for change, and provides world-wde examples of attempts at decentralization. The middle part of the book gives an overview of the theoretical basis for school improvement. It examines whether schools bahave differently from other types of organization. Institutional leadership and management are put under the microscope, with particular emphasis placed on the role of the principal in school improvement. The book concludes with a brilliant analysis of change strategies. It uses practical studies as well as referring back to the contextual framework and theoretical basis provided earlier. Strategies are reviewed on three levels of change: individual, organizational and those which target the entire system. School Development: Theories and Strategies is the culmination of many years' work by one of the acknowledged experts in the field. Its significance for all those who have an interest in furthering educational standards cannot be overestimated.

ANDY HARGREAVES Department of Teacher Education, Curriculum and Instruction Lynch School of Education, Boston College, MA, U.S.A. ANN LIEBERMAN Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Stanford, CA, U.S.A. MICHAEL FULLAN Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Canada DAVID HOPKINS Department for Education and Skills, London, U.K. This set of four volumes on Educational Change brings together evidence and insights on educational change issues from leading writers and researchers in the field from across the world. Many of these writers, whose chapters have been specially written for these books, have been investigating, helping initiate and implementing educational change, for most or all of their lengthy careers. Others are working on the cutting edge of theory and practice in educational change, taking the field in new or even more challenging directions. And some are more skeptical about the literature of educational change and the assumptions on which it rests. They help us to approach projects of understanding or initiating educational change more deeply, reflectively and realistically. Educational change and reform have rarely had so much prominence within public policy, in so many different places. Educational change is ubiquitous. It figures large in Presidential and Prime Ministerial speeches. It is at or near the top of many National policy agendas. Everywhere, educational change is not only a policy priority but also major public news. Yet action to bring about educational change usually exceeds people's understanding of how to do so effectively.

This open access book discusses challenges in school improvement research and different methodological approaches that have the potential to foster school improvement research. Research on school improvement and accountability analysis places high demands on a study's design and method. The potential of combining the depth of case studies with the breath of quantitative measures and analyses in a mixed-methods design seems very promising. Consequently, the focus of the book lies on innovative methodological approaches. The book chapters address design, measurement, and analysis developments as well as theoretical and conceptual developments. The relevance of the research presented in the chapters for educational accountability is discussed in the book's discussion chapter. More specifically, authors present one specific innovative methodological approach and clarify that approach with a concrete example in the context of school improvement, based on empirical data when possible. In this way, this book helps researchers designing complex useful studies.

School improvement is at the centre of educational reform and is perceived by many as a key to social and economic advance. It contributes to determining the personal fulfilment and career paths of individual students and consequently engages the interest of parents and community members. It is an ever-present commitment of teachers and managers in schools. Policy makers and politicians at international, national and local levels devote much time and effort to their search for better schools. School improvement has also attracted the attention of researchers and scholars in many countries. They have been drawn from various disciplines and fields within the educational studies community, including psychology, sociology, history, evaluation, and studies in curriculum and assessment. There is now an established body of findings from studies conducted in many contexts. This book brings together leading experts drawn from many countries and several continents, reflecting diverse approaches to educational policy and practice, evaluation and research. Variations between countries and between local communities within countries are highlighted. The possibilities and difficulties inherent in transferring evidence from one educational system, at a number of levels, to another are clearly discussed. What emerges from the cross-national and cross-cultural evidence are several significant threads, currently under active investigation, including: school structure and management, classroom organisation, school leadership, teacher training and staff development, curriculum and assessment, community involvement, lifelong learning and special provision for students with special educational needs. "School Improvement: International Perspectives" is written for national educational policy makers, teachers and student teachers, governing bodies and parents from various levels of schooling, and university researchers and scholars.

As societies continue to set educational goals that are, on current performance, beyond the capacity of the system to deliver, strategies for enhancing student learning through school and classroom intervention have become increasingly important. Yet, as David Hopkins argues in his book, many of the educational initiatives recently developed under the umbrella of school improvement are inadequate or unhelpful. Simply blaming teachers and delegating financial responsibility, he maintains, has little positive impact on classroom practice. This is the bleak context within which school improvement has to operate today. School Improvement for Real offers a genuine alternative: a strategy for educational change that focuses on student achievement by modifying classroom practice and adapting the management arrangements within the school to support teaching and learning. It outlines an approach to school improvement that has a medium term, systemic orientation, providing both principles and suggestions for better practice. The author's experience in the field of school improvement ensures that the text is informed by a practical wisdom that is so often lacking from the more typical managerial texts on improvement and effectiveness.

Written at a very accessible and practical level, this book introduces strategic management and provides self-development activities to help educators develop a strategy within their own organizations.

Despite the advances in educational effectiveness theory and methodology in the last 20 years, important questions and issues remain unresolved. In particular, existing theoretical frameworks of educational effectiveness are only able to describe the interrelationship among factors at the system, school, classroom, and student levels and their cross-level interdependency in a very general manner. Additionally, although a large number of studies provide empirical evidence of the impact of single factors and factor constellations on student learning, the embedding of the empirically identified results in theoretical models of educational effectiveness has to be carried out more systematically in order to develop more elaborated theories of educational effectiveness. The aim of this book is to contribute to the advancement of educational effectiveness theory by discussing different strategies: including alternative theoretical models to understand educational in/effectiveness, extending the methodology to analyze processes and mechanisms of educational in/effectiveness, analyzing differential effects of processes and instruments on educational in/effectiveness, carrying out complex multivariate analyses considering manifest and latent variables, and combining theory and practice in real school situations. Taken together, the strategies presented in this book make it clear that the advancement of educational effectiveness theory depends on the advancement of educational effectiveness methodology, or in other words: from theory to methodology and from empirical evidence back to theory. This book was originally published as a special issue of School Effectiveness and School Improvement.

The project School-In was an in-service professional development project which aimed to improve inclusion and facilitate schools' academic results by taking the local context, expectation structures, and school culture into consideration. This intervention project was based on a systemic approach and designed to include the entire teaching staff, ensuring cross-disciplinary and cross-level impact. Conducted in five Norwegian municipalities, School-In was financed by the Research Council of Norway (NFR) as an innovation project for the public sector. This book gives a detailed overview of the project School-In, documenting its research and intervention methods. It provides stakeholders, educational researchers, and practitioners with information about the make-up of the study. In this book, School-In is presented as an example of how new ideas and knowledge can be gained from several research approaches and readers are given specific examples of how development processes may be conducted and investigated in schools.