ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the issue of effective schools and with why the matter became so prominent in the early 1980s. It addresses the advent of new ideas about educational administration and school management. As J. Shoemaker and H. W. Fraser point out, disbelief in the efficacy of schools crystallised in 1966 with the publication of the Professor James Coleman Report in the USA. One of the most influential scholars connected with the effective schools movement, Ronald Edmonds, wrote in December 1982, 'Educators have become increasingly convinced that the characteristics of schools are important determinants of academic achievement'. The effective school, even in Edmonds' framework, is a concentrated culture, based upon a core assumption about its prime function, instruction and learning. From the mid-1970s educators were confronted with demands for accountability, for productivity, for a return to basic learnings, for contraction of the curriculum to a core of essential skills and concepts, for better use of personnel and so on.
