ABSTRACT
In these early stages of its development, school effectiveness research has shown heavily ethnocentric tendencies. Literatures referred to within books and articles have been usually almost exclusively based upon scholars and researchers within the country of origin of the writer (see Good and Brophy, 1986 for an American example, and Mortimore et al., 1988 for one from Great Britain). Although there has often been acknowledgment of the seminal American studies of Edmonds (1979a, 1979b), Brookover et al. (1979) and Coleman (1966) and of the British studies of Rutter et al. (1979) and Mortimore et al. (1988) in virtually all school effectiveness publications from all countries, there has clearly been no science of school effectiveness across countries as there has customarily been an international reach in the case of medicine, in most branches of psychology and in all of the ‘applied’ and ‘pure’ sciences.
