ABSTRACT
Though sharply contested by others in this volume, the research outcomes of the ESM-principally that schools can act independently of local or socioeconomic contexts-are understandably popular with policy-makers. Such findings are helpful politically because they enable any inadequacies in the school system to be passed on: to teachers and teacher trainers in the case of ‘progressive’ teaching methods; and to the poor leadership of headteachers in the case of ‘failing schools’. The school effectiveness findings are being used simultaneously to describe education, especially urban education, in pathological terms and to propose superficial solutions for the so-called under-performance of inner-city schools. In other words, the attraction of school effectiveness research lies in its political convenience rather than its intellectual integrity.
