and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific properties of school effects, processes at school and classroom level behind these effects, the somewhat limited translation of findings into policy and practice across the world, and future directions for research and practice in EER and for all of the discipline more generally. Future research needs are argued to be a further concentration upon teaching/teachers, more longitudinal studies, more work on possible context specificity, exploration of the cross-level transactions between schools and their teachers/classrooms, the adoption of "efficiency" as well as "effectiveness" as outcome measures, and a renewed focus upon the education of the disadvantaged, the original focus of our discipline when it began.

Student data are gaining increased attention in education, spurred by accountability policies such as those contained in the federal No Child Left Behind legislation. Student data are useful for informing classroom practice, and userfriendly technologies for organizing and accessing data are enabling access by all teachers. In this study, we examine the efforts of three schools to involve entire faculties in the examination of student data, supported by efficient data systems. Results indicate the importance of administrative supports in fostering such use. Data use often resulted in improved teaching practice such as collaboration, better knowledge of student needs, and efficiency of effort. These results are discussed in light of previous research.

Over the last 4 decades, the school effectiveness and school improvement research bases have gained prominence and recognition on the international stage. In both a theoretical and empirical sense, they have matured through a wide range of welldocumented projects, interventions, and innovations across a range of countries, describing how efforts to help schools become increasingly effective learning environments for the full range of their students have been more or less successful. This review presents evidence of the effects of reform efforts at the school and system levels, through articulating 5 phases: • Phase 1understanding the organisational culture of the school; • Phase 2action research and research initiatives at the school level; • Phase 3managing change and comprehensive approaches to school reform; • Phase 4building capacity for student learning at the local level and the continuing emphasis on leadership; • Phase 5towards systemic improvement. The review concludes by reflecting on how the phases evolve and overlap and offers 3 concluding thoughts about how to identify those levers that together provide more powerful ways to enhance the learning and achievement of our students within a systemic context.

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In the 1990s, federal legislation authorizing funding for secondary vocational education, increasingly called career and technical education (CTE), began to mandate accountability requirements such as improved academic achievement. These requirements have necessitated a search for ways to integrate CTE into broader school reforms that have improved student achievement as their goal. This review examines research on the effects of CTE reform efforts in general and on efforts to meld CTE with comprehensive secondary school reforms. The authors found that the intersection of CTE with comprehensive school reform is under-researched. However, the studies reviewed here reveal the potential benefit for research and practice in re-examining CTE as a means of preparing our nation’s youth for the future.

This article presents findings from a 4-year study of 13 culturally and linguistically diverse elementary schools implementing comprehensive school reform (CSR) models. The study focused on: (a) the actions at the state and district levels that facilitated or inhibited reform implementation; (b) the adaptability of the various reforms in multicultural, multilingual contexts; and (c) the student achievement outcomes associated with reform, for schools as a whole and for language minority students in particular. Some schools implemented reforms and bilingual education programs in mutually supportive ways; others had difficulty adapting reforms to suit the needs of Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. Reforms generally helped educators meet goals for multicultural education, but in some cases, educators’ beliefs about student ability, race, and language served as constraints to reform. Students from CSR schools had achievement outcomes that were generally equivalent to those for students from matched comparison schools. Under some circumstances, though, LEP students and their English-speaking peers from CSR schools outperformed their comparison school counterparts.

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JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Journal of Education.In The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman (2005) describes how decades pass between discoveries and the practical productivity gains from them. Two examples are illustrative: (1) the ability to generate and distribute electricity evolved in the 1890s, yet it was 30 years before electric motors produced widespread productivity increases, and (2) computer technologies began evolving in the 1940s toward the productivity gains given by our current worldwide information systems. In both cases, multiple vectors had to converge beyond the initial inventions in order to produce the vibrant U.S. economy of the twentieth century and the world economy of the twenty-first century.In the case of the ongoing productivity increases from the computer/information revolution, Friedman's first "convergence" was of rapidly evolving computer hardware with the subsequent development of "work flow software." This allowed businesses to move information much more rapidly. Friedman (2005, 177) notes that, while such a convergence can be valuable in isolation, "the big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business." In the case of the information economy, these include the integrated use of sophisticated computers and the evolution of large, sophisticated data "warehouses" to "flatten" not only macro-level world businesses but also the work lives and productivity of an unexpectedly wide array of persons. He documents this spread of data use and subsequent increases in productivity in contexts ranging from the U.S. Army to Wal-Mart.Education has been relatively slow in coming to the rapidly evolving worlds