ABSTRACT
The idea of school effectiveness and the associated research is increasingly popular. There is a regular international conference series devoted to it, and an international journal. While much of the history of what we might term the ‘school effectiveness movement’ has been based in USA, Europe and Australasia, findings and ideas from other parts of the world are also now coming to the fore, as evidenced in Levin and Lockheed’s recent collection Effective Schools in Developing Countries (1993). As they point out, the appeal of effectiveness research is that it is simultaneously sophisticated (statistically) and common sense. The factors associated with ‘good’ schools are rarely surprising, but it appears useful to have our hunches confirmed systematically to add weight to policy and management reform.
