Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field’s origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific properties of school effects, processes at school and classroom level behind these effects, the somewhat limited translation of findings into policy and practice across the world, and future directions for research and practice in EER and for all of the discipline more generally. Future research needs are argued to be a further concentration upon teaching/teachers, more longitudinal studies, more work on possible context specificity, exploration of the cross-level transactions between schools and their teachers/classrooms, the adoption of “efficiency” as well as “effectiveness” as outcome measures, and a renewed focus upon the education of the disadvantaged, the original focus of our discipline when it began.

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Educational effectiveness research (EER): a state-of-the-art review

INTRODUCTION This chapter will review recent research literature concerning the progress and effects of the currently fashionable \"parental choice\" and \"school autonomy\" agendas in contemporary education policy. In discussing parental choice, the chapter will be particularly concerned with those policies that claim to enhance opportunities for choice among public schools and those that use public funds to extend choice into the private sector. School autonomy, as used here, refers to moves to devolve various aspects of decision making from regional and district offices to individual public schools, whether to site-based professionals, community-based councils, or a combination of both. Advocates of both sets of policies argue that they will enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, and responsiveness of the education system as a whole. The rationale for considering these two agendas together may need some explanation, especially in the United States, where the provenance of the two reforms is quite different and where, in some respects, they are competing strategies. Thus, for example, Moe (1994) suggests that school-based management is a selfserving reform favored by professional educators and designed to resist demands for the radical alternative of choice, which puts power in the hands of consumers. Yet, while he is critical of site-based management as it is generally practiced in

Chapter 1: Creating Quasi-Markets in Education: A Review of Recent Research on Parental Choice and School Autonomy in Three Countries:

Gender research has made a call for more transparency and accountability in academic recruitment and selection in order to overcome the inequality practices that have led to an underrepresentation of women among full professors. This paper provides insight into the multiple ways in which the notions of transparency and accountability are put into practice in academic recruitment and selection, and how this has enhanced — or hindered — gender equality. The methods employed consist of a qualitative content analysis of seven recruitment and selection protocols, interviews with 64 committee members, and an analysis of 971 appointment reports of full professors in the Netherlands. Our analysis contributes to the study of organizations in three respects. First, it shows that recruitment and selection processes are characterized by bounded transparency and limited accountability at best. Second, it explains that the protocols that should ensure transparency and accountability remain paper tigresses, because of t...

Transparency in Academic Recruitment: A Problematic Tool for Gender Equality?

Sweden has commonly been regarded as a striking example of a social democratic welfare-state regime (Esping-Andersen 1996), characterized by strong state governance and active involvement in welfare matters. In the last two decades, however, the Swedish public sector and education system have been radically and extensively transformed in a neo-liberal direction, a move that was preceded by extensive decentralization of decision-making from the state to municipalities and schools. In this article the scope, character and some of the consequences of internal and external marketization of Swedish education in the early 2000s are summarized, and the impact of competition on the internal workings of upper secondary schools is highlighted in particular. We conclude that the external marketization of education has proceeded a long way and Sweden also fully embraces new public management, i.e. ‘inner marketization’, of education in most respects. However, aspects of the older social democratic policy paradigm are still visible with regard to the assigned functions, values and governance of education.

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Educational marketization the Swedish way

Marketization and privatization in mass education systems

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Markets in Education: An Analytical Review of Empirical Research on Market Mechanisms in Education. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 52.

The impact of the marketization of education on choice and school intakes in ‘Greencity’, New Zealand is examined. We report a study of a ‘lived’ market, drawing on both qualitative analyses of the enrolment patterns of almost 9000 secondary school students as well as interviews with school principals. The removal of zoning in Greencity provided more choice only to a small group of families. By enlarging the already sizeable group of higher socio‐economic students bypassing their local schools, choice intensified socio‐economic segregation between schools. Market reforms were thus found to have a differential impact on schools with some working‐class schools entering a spiral of decline while higher socio‐economic status schools were relatively unaffected. The responses of schools to the market varied considerably in ways that were related to their initial market position, their ability to change the formal rules of the market and the actions of neighbouring schools. The authors suggest that some...

Choice, competition and segregation.

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to show that upward mobility of female academics in regular selection procedures is evolving extremely slowly, especially in The Netherlands. This paper aims at a more profound understanding of professorial recruitment and selection procedures in relation to gender differences at Dutch universities.Design/methodology/approach – This paper explores the recruitment of university professors as a gendered process and is mainly based on the analysis of selection committee reports between 1999‐2003 from six large Dutch universities (n=682).Findings – The research findings give a clear indication of gender differences in selection and recruitment procedures. Although not in all disciplines, the paper observes a disparity in the percentages of male and female applicants who were successful in the selection procedure. There is no confirmation of the predicted relationship with the nature of the procedure (open/closed), but there is a correlation with the number of women on...

Does Excellence have a Gender? A National Research on Recruitment and Selection Procedures for Professorial Appointments in the Netherlands

In the last three decennia, many governments have introduced market mechanisms in education. They
have done so by enhancing parental choice and encouraging school competition, through policies like
abolishing catchment areas, creating voucher programmes and setting up charter schools. These market
mechanisms have given rise to fierce debates in both political and scientific circles. However, most prior
reviews of research literature in this area have concluded that the effects of market mechanisms in
education are small, if they are found at all. This review tries to answer the question why that is the case,
by analysing the causal pathways that link market mechanisms to educational outcomes and by reviewing
the empirical evidence for each step along those causal pathways. The findings of this review point to the
need for a nuanced and qualified discussion about market mechanisms in education. What market
mechanisms mean in actual practice strongly depends on (local) contexts, while the impact of market
mechanisms is related to other policies impacting on parental choice behaviour as well as actions taken by
schools.

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S. Waslander

Papers

Markets in Education: An Analytical Review of Empirical Research on Market Mechanisms in Education. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 52.

Choice, competition and segregation.

Does Excellence have a Gender? A National Research on Recruitment and Selection Procedures for Professorial Appointments in the Netherlands

Markets in Education: An Analytical Review of Empirical Research on Market Mechanisms in Education

Does Excellence have a Gender? A National Research Study on Recruitment and Selection Procedures for Professorial Appointments in the Netherlands