ABSTRACT
School effectiveness research has its roots in quantitative sociological input-output studies and economic research on educational production functions. The second wave of school effectiveness research emphasized “process” rather than “input” correlates of school output and employed more in-depth investigation of relatively small samples of schools. The main outcomes of this period of school effectiveness research - sometimes characterized as the five-factor model of school effectiveness - still dominate practical thinking on school effectiveness. This chapter discusses the development of such models by means of a critique of the state of the art of conceptualizing school effectiveness, by examining the overall structure of a multi-level school effectiveness model and by further specifying some of the basic substantive ingredients of this model, most notably instructional variables and organizational and contextual conditions. To illustrate some of the points, it provides an overview of school effectiveness studies in the Netherlands, and compares the outcomes to the results of major Anglo-Saxon effectiveness studies.
