An Analysis of Private School Mission Statements

This article is a study of private school mission/vision statements using content analysis. Statements from private schools in British Columbia, Canada, that provided instruction to Grade 12 students were analyzed to explore the diversity that lies within the private school sector. The concepts that emerged from the analysis were grouped into five categories: concepts that declared the school's distinctive beliefs, concepts that presented the school's goals and objectives, and concepts outlining the environment, services offered, and parental involvement. It was found that there is considerable diversity between private school groups in the school distinctives and in the goals and objectives pursued by the schools.     

The case of the leaving certificate applied

This paper deals with the topic of child protection in Irish primary schools, and reports on a recently completed survey of newly qualified teachers’ knowledge of and familiarity with their school's child protection policies and procedures. The study was undertaken by means of a questionnaire survey, and conducted with 103 teachers from different schools. The child protection roles and responsibilities of schools are clearly spelt out in national guidelines. However, the findings from this research indicate that compliance with the requirement to inform new staff about the guidelines and ensure that they have read them is weak. This is evidenced by the data concerning the teachers’ reported knowledge of, and familiarity with, their school's child protection policies. Half of the respondents did not know if their school had a child protection policy or not. Of those who were aware of their school's child protection policy, only just over half had read it. Well under half of the respondents knew if there was a Designated Liaison Person (DLP) with responsibility for child protection in their school. Furthermore, nearly two-thirds of respondents reported uncertainty or lack of confidence in being able to identify suspected child abuse. The paper draws on international research on child protection in education to provide the context for a discussion on the factors that influence schools’ motivation and willingness to collaborate as key protectors of children's safety and welfare, and makes recommendations for policy makers, school managers and frontline staff.     

Are separate schools divisive? A case study from Northern Ireland

In Northern Ireland, where the majority of children are educated at schools attended mainly by coreligionists, the debate concerning the role of schools in perpetuating intergroup hostilities has recently been reignited. Against questions regarding the efficacy of community relations policy in education, the research reported in this paper employs qualitative methods to examine social identity and intergroup attitudes amongst children attending a state controlled Protestant school and the school's response to dealing with issues of diversity and difference. Findings suggest a relationship between ethnic isolation experienced by children and negative intergroup social attitudes and the discussion focuses on issues germane to the separateness of the school that are likely to contribute to strong ‘own’ group bias, stereotyping and prejudice. The implication of the school's separate status for its engagement with a policy framework for relationship building is also considered. The paper concludes with some policy reflections that are likely to have resonance beyond Northern Ireland.     

Professional Learning Community in Relation to School Effectiveness

This is a study of schools as professional learning communities, defined by nine characteristics and their relationship with the schools' level of effectiveness. The study was conducted within three schools in Iceland. It was designed as a mixed methods study, conducted in two phases: a correlational study of survey data on schools as professional learning communities and an experimental study, where effort was made to improve the level of the professional learning community and evaluate its effects on pupils' outcomes. In both phases relatively strong evidence was obtained on the relationship between a school's level of effectiveness and its level as a professional learning community. In the experimental school, interventions resulted in higher scores on national tests, especially in mathematics.     

Mind the Gap: How Students Differentially Perceive Their School's Attendance Policies in Germany

Truant student behavior can be due to various reasons. Some of these reasons are located in schools. So far, little is known about how student perception of school rules is related to truancy. This study aims to identify types of school attendance policies and how these policies are associated with individual truancy. Self-reports from the German student sample of PISA 2012 (N = 5,001) were analyzed to evaluate truancy and student perception of school attendance policies. A linear regression model was specified to predict truancy. Two styles of school attendance policies as perceived by students could be distinguished: active and passive. Students who perceived their school's attendance policy to be active were truant less often than students who thought their school's attendance policy was passive.     

THE ORTHODOX DAY SCHOOL AND ITS NONOBSERVANT POPULATION

Many of Canada's day schools¹ are experiencing a phenomenon whereby only 10 to 20 percent of their student populations reflect the school's Orthodox ideology. This ratio of observant to nonobservant is also an accurate estimate of their parent population. Yet, virtually all Canadian senior high schools² and many elementary schools of similar populations remain Orthodox in their philosophies. Such a situation can present schools and parent bodies with a variety of dilemmas: Parents are often not aware of Jewish educational goals; children are more educated than their parents; there is little parental support to many school values (eg. kashrut, Shabbat, etc.); some school values are discouraged; and parent/school tensions can result out of a lack of understanding. Such schools as Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, Associated Hebrew Schools of Toronto,³ Herzilia Academy of Montreal,⁴ and Joseph Wolinsky Collegiate of Winnipeg⁵ all must address this issue since the observant population is a minority in their systems. Consequently, a significant percentage of their students do not subscribe to their school's philosophy. This situation is not unique in Canada. Many Orthodox day schools see their original mandate as increasing Torah awareness of all their pupils in the communities they serve.     

Facilitating Teachers' Participation in School‐Based Health Promotion—A Qualitative Study

The focus of this article is on examining Norwegian teachers' perception of what factors at the school's organisational level have facilitated their participation in a school‐based health promotion project. The study is based on 12 semistructured interviews with teachers from two of the pilot schools participating in the European Network of Health Promoting Schools. The findings indicate that there are a number of conditions at the organisational level facilitating the implementation process and the teachers' participation in the project. These conditions are common goals, good leadership, sufficient and available resources, competence and cooperation inside the school and with the local community. The results from this study also indicate that working with the Health Promoting Schools Project helped the teachers in fulfilling many of the goals of the new Norwegian National Curriculum (L97), and in the longer term, also contributed to the implementation of the new reform.     

School Choice in London,England: Characteristics of Students in Different Types of Secondary Schools

In England, parents make “choices” (in reality, “preferences”) for the state-maintained secondary schools they wish their child to attend. If there are more applicants than places, the school's published admissions criteria are used to give priority to applicants. This article examines how school composition in London varies by first comparing schools that are overtly academically selective with those that are nominally “comprehensive” (“all ability”); second, comparing “comprehensive” schools that control their own admissions with those that do not; third, comparing schools with and without selective admissions criteria; and fourth, comparing schools that use religious criteria with those that do not. We find that school compositions vary. Academically selective schools have fewer students from poor households than comprehensive schools in the same area and have fewer Black and more Indian and Chinese/Other Asian students. Comprehensive schools with autonomy over admissions admit higher attaining students and have fewer students from poor households and with special educational needs, and those with selective admissions criteria admit higher performing children. There are fewer Bangladeshi/Pakistani students and more Black students in schools with a religious character than in those without. Although a range of factors are likely to play a role in explaining the variation in school composition, the evidence suggests that there is “selecting in” and “selecting out” of more desirable students by some schools. Implications for policy are highlighted.     

Principal's Leadership as a Critical Factor for School Performance: Evidence from Multi‐Levels of Primary Schools 1

This study aims to investigate how principal's leadership is related to school performance in terms of multi‐level indicators such as school's organizational characteristics, teachers’ group‐level and individual‐level performances, and students’ performances. In the study, strong leadership represents that a principal can be supportive and foster participation for teachers, can develop clear goals and policies and hold people accountable for results, can be persuasive at building alliances and solving conflicts, can be inspirational and charismatic, and can encourage professional development and teaching improvement. The strong leadership is found associated with high organizational effectiveness, strong organizational culture, positive principal‐teachers relationship, more participation in decision, high teacher esprit and professionalism, less teacher disengagement and hindrance, more teacher job satisfaction and commitment, and more positive student performance particularly on attitudes to their schools and learning. The findings support that principal's leadership is a critical factor for school performance at multi‐levels. Implications are advanced for further study and development of leadership.

     

Raising achievement through inclusion

In 2007, Swedish authorities introduced open publication of comparisons of students' results at the end of compulsory school. In this study, we investigated a municipality that had succeeded in breaking a negative trend from a bottom position in the ranking in 2007 to a top position in 2010, apparently through inclusive practices. The purpose of this study is to examine and isolate key elements that make a difference in schools and classrooms in the work with all students. Data were collected through interviews and classroom observations. Mary Douglas' cultural–cognitive perspective of institutional theory and the work of Ludwik Fleck are used to identify and analyse factors of importance to the increased goal fulfilment. The school's decision to end all segregated small group activities and to include all children in the normal classroom activity is examined. Moreover, the emphasis on teachers’ reading and discussing of national and international research and focusing on all children's right to succeed in the classroom is analysed. The analysis suggests that focusing on goal fulfilment through inclusion gave a wider definition to the concept of successful schooling and changed the traditional thought style of the school.     

Crossing boundaries: Exploring the theory,practice and possibility of a ‘Future 3’ curriculum

In this article, we examine a case of innovation in curriculum and pedagogy at a new school in the UK. We begin by outlining the 3 Futures model, which we use as a methodological heuristic in the case study of the school that appears to be both knowledge-led and learner-engaged; characteristics of the Future 3 scenario. In considering the school's curriculum, we also draw on a number of concepts from the work of Basil Bernstein: classification, framing and the idea of open schools, and a curriculum integration model developed by us to consider the degree of epistemic emphasis in the school's predominantly interdisciplinary curriculum. Together, these concepts provide the means to examine the organising principles of practice operating in the school, as links are drawn between the 3 Futures model, Bernstein's concepts and the data. We theorise this as a form of ‘opening up’, suggesting that even within the context of an interdisciplinary curriculum, access to powerful knowledge may be maintained in a whole-school approach where the demands of both knowledge and knowers are brought into balance. The school's approach and the theorisation we offer may provide insights for other schools embarking on a futures model for education and for twenty-first-century educational discourses more generally.     

Do Principals Affect Student Outcomes: An Organizational Perspective

This research study investigated the principal's role as instructional manager, its relationship to student achievement, and how principals influence teachers to accomplish the school's goal of increasing student learning. Conceptually, principal instructional management includes those processes, both mental and physical, that the principal uses which result in other people executing formal and informal duties to achieve organizational goals. It deals mainly with planning, organizing and controlling teacher behavior to achieve organizational goals, but also includes monitoring and controlling resources. Subjects for the study included elementary school (K‐8) principals and teachers in 27 schools. Student achievement gain was determined by regression analysis where current achievement was regressed on prior achievement and SES for two years of data. Principal instructional management behavior was measured by a modified form of the Instructional Management Rating Scales, or IMRS (Hallinger, 1983). The results from the study question whether principals should be led by researchers and policymakers into thinking that increasing their instructional management behaviors will turn ineffective schools into effective ones. School improvement is a complex process that involves a host of factors which principals can influence, but not control. While principals play an important role as part of the schools' efforts in school improvement, the role of the principal in school improvement, must be placed in its proper perspective.     

Pluralism and its Purposeful Introduction to a Jewish Day School

Pluralism is an ambiguous term with a multiplicity of meanings. In recent decades there has been a proliferation of a newer category of Jewish Day Schools, the Jewish Community School. Jewish Community Schools distinguish themselves by positioning pluralism as a foundational concept of their school's ethos. Very little is known about how individuals within these schools understand the notion of pluralism. This case study uses in-depth interviews, documentary research, and school observations to determine how policymakers in one such Community School think about pluralism in general, and how this understanding influences their vision for the school's Jewish Education.     

Profiles of Organizational Culture and Effective Schools∗

This study intends to investigate how school organizational culture is related to important organizational characteristics and observe how the profiles of strong culture‐effective schools are different from those of weak culture‐ineffective schools in terms of organizational variables (such as principal's leadership, organizational structure, and teachers’ social interactions), teachers’ job attitudes, and school effectiveness criteria. It is a cross‐sectional survey research involving 54 randomly sampled Hong Kong secondary schools and 588 teachers. The unit of analysis is the school.

Organizational ideology index was found to be substantially correlated with schools’ perceived organizational effectiveness. Among the 10 measures of these organizational variables, teachers’ esprit and principal's charismatic leadership can contribute substantially to the prediction of school's strength of organizational culture. The organizational profile of perceived strong culture‐effective schools is contrastingly different from that of perceived weak culture‐ineffective schools. The findings suggest that difference in organizational culture can be reflected at least in three overt levels: 1. organizational level in terms of principal's leadership behaviors, organizational formalization and participation, and teachers’ social norms; 2. teachers’ attitudinal level in terms of organizational commitment, social job satisfaction, intrinsic job satisfaction, and influence job satisfaction; and 3. school effectiveness level in terms of perceived overall organizational effectiveness and academic achievements in public examinations.

The findings reinforce the importance of organizational culture to the ongoing effort and discussion of school improvement and school effectiveness.

     

初中生成就目标的发展特点

采用《成就目标定向量表》,对633名初中学生进行了调查。结果表明:(1)不同年级初中生的成就目标定向有显著差异,表现为:初一学生的掌握趋近目标极显著高于初二、初三学生,初二学生又显著高于初三学生;初一学生的成绩趋近目标显著高于初二学生;(2)不同学校的初中生成就目标定向有显著差异,表现为:重点学校学生掌握趋近目标、成绩趋近目标极显著高于普通学校学生;而普通学校学生的成绩回避目标显著高于重点学校学生;(3)初中生男生和女生的成就目标定向有显著差异,表现为:男生的成绩回避目标显著高于女生。     

Experiencing inclusion within a Northern Ireland secondary school: the perspectives of migrant students from four European countries

The article focuses upon a small‐scale research project undertaken in a Northern Ireland secondary school. Using a questionnaire, the article explores the views of a sample of young people from four European countries who are enrolled at the school, regarding the school's inclusive policy and associated practices. In recent years, Northern Ireland has experienced a significant increase in the number of migrant families that have settled in the province; this has presented schools with a challenge as to how their policies on inclusion are capable of embracing the needs of students with different cultural experiences and expectations. It is apparent that the school has made a considerable investment to provide a positive experience for these students. Likewise, it is evident that there are both financial and staff development implications associated with creating an inclusive school culture.     

‘It's like Spiderman … with great power comes great responsibility’: school autonomy,school context and the audit culture

This paper explores issues of school autonomy within the context of the performative demands of the audit culture. The focus is on a case study of Clementine Academy, a large and highly diverse English secondary school. Specific situated, professional, material and external factors at the school were significant in shaping Clementine's response to and take-up of the policy of academisation (a key reform within broader government mandates to create an increasingly autonomised education system). Factors such as the school's intake and history, its ethos and values, its access to human and economic resources and its status and power as an outstanding school supported its confident and ‘morally’ focused take-up of this policy. Clementine's privileged position in relation to these factors enabled the school to mediate and challenge some of the negative effects of the audit culture. This paper highlights the significance of considering these contextual factors in understanding the different ways in which schools are currently engaging their autonomy to cope with the demands of the audit culture.     

Predicting teachers' achievement goals for teaching: The role of perceived school goal structure and teachers' sense of efficacy

The present study investigated contextual and personal factors associated with teachers' achievement goals for teaching. A total of 211 teachers completed an online survey. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that perceived school mastery goal structure and performance goal structure predicted teachers' mastery goals and performance-approach goals, respectively. Teachers' sense of efficacy moderated the effect of perceived school goal structures on achievement goals for teaching. Teachers with high teaching efficacy maintained personal achievement goals for teaching even when their schools emphasized conflicting goals. However, teachers with low teaching efficacy tended to assimilate the goals promoted by their schools.     

Evaluating Portfolio Use as a Learning Tool for Professionals

We have earlier reported overall teacher emphases on six general educational goals. In the present study we present school level analyses of the same goal variables. The new focus of the present study was on possible school differences in teacher goal emphases. It is assumed that school differences may indicate a process of teacher socialisation in schools, particularly if these characteristics are relatively stable over time. About 40 schools were analysed at two points in time and they were represented by two different samples of teachers (144 and 157 teachers). We analysed both individual goal variables and goal profiles defined by how the teachers ranked the six goals. Only the 'profile approach' indicated school-specific goal priorities. The results also showed that the degree of goal consensus in schools should not be regarded as an aspect of the school climate. In addition, the measure of school goal consensus was weakly related to other examined aspects of the school climate.