International Handbook of School Effectiveness and Improvement

About this book

In January 2007, in Slovenia, the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) celebrated its twentieth year of bringing people together. Conferences have been held in many parts of the world and each year, key educational researchers, practitioners and policy makers have been brought together to consider ways of making school effective for all students who enter them. Murphy argued (1991, pp. 166 - 168) that there are four factors which can be considered as the legacy of school effectiveness. He suggests the most fundamental of the four is that "given appropriate conditions, all children can learn." The second product of the school effectiveness research stems from a rejection of the historical perspective that good schools and bad schools could be identified by the socio-economic status of the area in which they were located. School effectiveness examined student outcomes, not in absolute terms, but in terms of the value added to students' abilities by the school, rather than the outside-of-school factors. He further argued that school effectiveness researchers were the first to reject the philosophy that "poor academic performance and deviant behaviour have been defined as problems of individual children or their families" (Cuban, 1989; Murphy, 1991). School effectiveness helped to eliminate the practice of "blaming the victim for the shortcomings of the school." Finally, the research showed that "the better schools are more tightly linked - structurally, symbolically and culturally - than the less effective ones." There was a greater degree of consistency and co-ordination in terms of the curriculum, the teaching and the organisation within the school.