In this practical resource, The authors maintain that to effect real reform today's educators must understand how leading and managing for instructional improvement gets done in their school and in turn use their diagnoses as the basis for mindful design and redesign.

At the heart of the effort to enact and scale up successful school reforms is the need for more robust links between research and practice. One promising approach is design development, a methodology widely used in other fields and only recently adapted to education, which offers a disciplined process for identifying practical problems, assessing evidence of outcomes, accounting for variability in implementation and results, and establishing a foundation for broader understanding of the problem and proposed solutions. This exciting new book provides a practical guide for education leaders who are seeking to address issues of equity in their schools and want to pursue this approach. The book provides a step-by-step description of the process, augmented by case studies of four education leaders: Christine, a middle school principal who is concerned with the volume of disciplinary referrals in her school; Michelle, an elementary school principal who wants to address achievement gaps; Eric, an assistant superintendent who wants to improve the quality of principals’ instructional feedback to teachers; and Nora, a high school principal who is concerned about the use of racial and homophobic slurs in the hallways. The book follows each of these leaders as they formulate and refine interventions to address these problems. Design-Based School Improvement also includes a series of “excursions into theory” that discuss the research basis for design-based improvement. The author—a leading thinker about policy implementation and school reform—shows a profound appreciation for the complexity of work in schools and the deep and sustained thinking entailed in undertaking productive change. By bringing theory to life and putting it in the hands of skilled practitioners, this book promises to become an invaluable resource for education leaders seeking to solve problems of equity and social justice in schools.

James Spillane, the leading expert in Distributed Leadership, shows how leadership happens in everyday practices in schools, through formal routines and informal interactions. He examines the distribution of leadership among administrators, specialists, and teachers in the school, and explains the ways in which leadership practice is stretched over leaders, followers, and aspects of the situation, including routines and tools of various sorts in the organization such as memos, scheduling procedures, and evaluation protocols. This book is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education—a series designed to meet the demand for new ideas and insights about leadership in schools.

-This text presents a step-by-step approach to problem diagnosis and school improvement. --

Internationally there is an increasing trend to publish and feed back information to schools and teachers on their functioning. School improvement is often the central goal, though accountability and the promotion of parental/student school choice also play an important role.Practical initiatives and research in this field have often failed to recognize the full complexity of improving schools through school performance feedback. Relevant questions are, for example, to what extent: the information fed back to schools is valued and understood by them; the school performance feedback enables appropriate diagnosis and remediation to take place in schools; the use of the feedback generates conflicts and tensions for teachers and administrators; the features of the implementation process and school organization influence the utilization of school performance feedback systems; schools do actually improve as a result of performance feedback; and the feedback systems have unintended effects. This book fills the gap by including: a thorough conceptualization of school feedback as a performance enhancing mechanism, and the prerequisites for utilizing this information in schools; a typology of school performance indicators; a review of the research on the impact of feeding back performance information to individuals and to organizations; evidence on the process, problems and impact of school performance feedback from an international variety of contexts (Australia, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, USA); and reflections on these experiences within the theoretical framework, leading to recommended strategies for school improvement through performance feedback.

Bayesian inference networks, a synthesis of statistics and expert systems, have advanced reasoning under uncertainty in medicine, business, and social sciences. This innovative volume is the first comprehensive treatment exploring how they can be applied to design and analyze innovative educational assessments. Part I develops Bayes nets’ foundations in assessment, statistics, and graph theory, and works through the real-time updating algorithm. Part II addresses parametric forms for use with assessment, model-checking techniques, and estimation with the EM algorithm and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). A unique feature is the volume’s grounding in Evidence-Centered Design (ECD) framework for assessment design. This “design forward” approach enables designers to take full advantage of Bayes nets’ modularity and ability to model complex evidentiary relationships that arise from performance in interactive, technology-rich assessments such as simulations. Part III describes ECD, situates Bayes nets as an integral component of a principled design process, and illustrates the ideas with an in-depth look at the BioMass project: An interactive, standards-based, web-delivered demonstration assessment of science inquiry in genetics. This book is both a resource for professionals interested in assessment and advanced students. Its clear exposition, worked-through numerical examples, and demonstrations from real and didactic applications provide invaluable illustrations of how to use Bayes nets in educational assessment. Exercises follow each chapter, and the online companion site provides a glossary, data sets and problem setups, and links to computational resources.

The last decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in the twin fields of school effectiveness and school improvement by politicians, policy makers and practitioners. For some, the drive has been to raise standards and increase accountability through inspection and assessment measures, believing that the incentive of accountability and market competition will lead to improvement. Alternatively, reform and restructuring have led many people in schools to create their own agenda and ask, ‘How do we know that what we are doing makes a positive difference to our pupils?’ and, ‘What can we do to provide pupils with the best possible education?’ This paper explores the two paradigms that underpin notions of school effectiveness and school improvement. We start with their definitions and aims. Key factors of effectiveness and improvement are examined and fundamental issues discussed. We conclude with a description of attempts to link the two areas of work.