Thinking the unthinkable?

There is no doubt that school effectiveness and school improvement (SESI) has made substantial progress over the last twenty years, as shown in numerous reviews of the field (e.g. Teddlie and Reynolds, 2000). The sheer noise of our critics and their number tells us this, given the academic tendency for substantial achievement to evoke trenchant criticism, a situation within our field that started from the very beginning with the somewhat hostile academic reaction to the pioneering work of Rutter et al. (1979).