Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Has school effectiveness research come of age? After 18 years personally engaged in investigating the topic this seems to me an important question both for practitioners and policy makers seeking to make use of its findings as well as for researchers seeking a better understanding of the impact of their work. It is difficult to pin point the ‘start’ of school effectiveness research exactly since many different sub-disciplines have studied schools and classrooms from a vari- ety of perspectives (Creemers 1994a). Nonetheless in the US and UK the chief catalyst seems to have been the publication of work by Coleman (1966) and Jencks et al. (1972). These researchers suggested that although schooling was undoubtedly important the particular school attended by a student had little influence on their educational outcomes in comparison with the influence of fac- tors such as IQ race and socio-economic status (SES). The sociological deter- minism evident in mainstream educational research in the UK which focused on structural inequalities in particular meant that studies of school effectiveness were initiated by ‘outsiders’ working in different traditions and the early results of seminal studies such as Fifteen Thousand Hours (Rutter et al. 1979) were- regarded with hostility by many (Reynolds 1997). As we enter the new millen- nium it is right to look back over the last quarter century or so of school effec- tiveness research and reflect on its growth and development the problems encountered and overcome continuing challenges and directions for the future. My first encounter with school effectiveness research came as a post gradation. (SP)