linking school effectiveness and school improvement: the background and outline of the project

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Linking school effectiveness and schoolimprovement: The background andoutline of the projectBert P. M. Creemers a & Gerry J. Reezigt ba GION, Groningen Institute for Educational Research , Universityof Groningen , The Netherlandsb Inspectorate of Education , Groningen, The NetherlandsPublished online: 16 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: Bert P. M. Creemers & Gerry J. Reezigt (2005) Linking school effectivenessand school improvement: The background and outline of the project, School Effectiveness andSchool Improvement: An International Journal of Research, Policy and Practice, 16:4, 359-371, DOI:10.1080/09243450500234484

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Linking School Effectiveness and School

Improvement: The background and

outline of the project

Bert P. M. Creemersa* and Gerry J. Reezigtb

aGION, Groningen Institute for Educational Research, University of Groningen,

The Netherlands, bInspectorate of Education, Groningen, The Netherlands

School effectiveness and school improvement have different origins: School effectiveness is more

directed to finding out ‘‘what works’’ in education and ‘‘why’’; school improvement is practice and

policy oriented and intended to change education in the desired direction. However, in their

orientation to outcomes, input, processes, and context in education, they also have much in

common. In the project Effective School Improvement (ESI), the merger of the 2 traditions has

been pursued. In the theoretical part, different orientations have been analysed and combined in a

model for effective school improvement. Based on this analysis, an evaluation framework was

developed for the analysis of the case studies of school improvement projects in the participating

countries. The theoretical model and the results of the analyses of the case studies were combined in

a framework of effective school improvement.

Introduction: Research and practice in school improvement

From the beginning, a major aim of the school effectiveness movement was to link

theory and empirical research relating to educational effectiveness and the

improvement of education. School effectiveness has its roots in research and theory

(e.g., the work of Brookover, Beady, Flood, & Schweitzer, 1979; Rutter, Maughan,

Mortimore, & Ouston, 1979), but also in educational practice and policy (Edmonds,

1979). School effectiveness research has attempted to find the factors of effective

education that could be introduced or changed in education through school

*Corresponding author. GION, Groningen Institute for Educational Research, University of

Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

School Effectiveness and School ImprovementVol. 16, No. 4, December 2005, pp. 359 – 371

ISSN 0924-3453 (print)/ISSN 1744-5124 (online)/05/040359–13

� 2005 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09243450500234484

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improvement. Despite its relatively short history, school effectiveness and improve-

ment has shown some success in linking effectiveness and improvement: see for

example the National School Improvement (NSI) Project in The Netherlands. In this

project, knowledge about school effectiveness and early reading were combined in the

design of the programme. The programme was implemented in educational practice

through the existing system of school advising centres and strategies and methods for

support were improved—becoming more focused and structured—in the project

(Creemers & De Jong, 2000; De Jong, Houtveen, & Westerhof, 2002).

Scepticism, however, has been expressed about the possibilities of a merger

between school effectiveness and school improvement. Creemers and Reezigt (1997)

argue that there are intrinsic differences between the school effectiveness tradition,

which ultimately is a programme for research with its focus on theory and

explanation, and the school improvement tradition, which is a programme for

innovation focusing on change and problem-solving in educational practice.

At least in early stages, in school effectiveness circles it was expected that a more or

less ‘‘simple’’ application of school effectiveness knowledge about ‘‘what works’’ in

education would result in school improvement. In school improvement circles, this

was seen as simplistic and mechanistic which would not work in schools. Schools

have to design and invent their own solutions for specific problems and improvement

in general. Nevertheless, Creemers and Reezigt (1997) with others (e.g., Reynolds,

Hopkins, & Stoll, 1993) advocated further linkage between school effectiveness and

school improvement, for their mutual benefit. School effectiveness research and

theory can provide insights and knowledge to be used in school improvement. School

improvement is a very powerful tool for the testing of theories. School improvement

can also provide new insights and new possibilities for effective school factors, which

can be analysed further in effective school research. In recent years, there have been

examples of productive co-operation between school effectiveness and school

improvement, in which new ways of merging the two traditions/orientations have

been attempted (see Gray et al., 1999; MacBeath & Mortimore, 2001; Reynolds &

Stoll, 1996; Stoll & Fink, 1992, 1994, 1996; Stoll, Reynolds, Creemers, & Hopkins,

1996; for an overview see Reynolds, Teddlie, Hopkins, & Stringfield, 2000).

In school effectiveness research, some international comparative studies have been

carried out to find the similarities and differences between countries with respect to

the factors that are related to school effectiveness. Conditions at the contextual

level—and the differences between countries—which are supposed to explain

differences in outcomes of education (Thrupp, 1999), have been a particular object

of research (Reynolds, Creemers, Stringfield, Teddlie, & Schaffer, 2002).

Until the Effective School Improvement (ESI) Project, however, the links had not

been explored across countries. While sharing school improvement initiatives and

projects between countries has been common at International Congress for School

Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) conferences since its inception in 1988, joint

international projects have been less frequently undertaken, especially those

attempting to understand if effective school improvement is a similar phenomenon

in different countries and to draw out findings that might be applicable beyond

360 B. P. M. Creemers and G. J. Reezigt

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country boundaries. This was a key aim of the Effective School Improvement Project

(ESI), a project running from 1998 to 2001, that drew together teams from eight

European countries: Belgium, England, Finland, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands,

Portugal, and Spain (Creemers & Hoeben, 1998). Another aim was to continue to

establish stronger links between the two paradigms of school effectiveness and school

improvement to help both profit from each other’s strongest points.

The Effective School Improvement (ESI) Project

The project Capacity for Change and Adaptation in the Case of Effective School

Improvement (ESI), Framework Programme, was designed to investigate the relation

between effectiveness and improvement in order to increase the possibility for schools

to improve education. Drawing on the definition of improvement of Hopkins,

Ainscow, and West (1994), the concept of effective school improvement was defined

as follows: Effective school improvement refers to planned educational change that

enhances student learning outcomes as well as the school’s capacity for managing

change. The addition of the term ‘‘managing’’ emphasises the processes and activities

that have to be carried out in school in order to achieve change/improvement. To

evaluate effective school improvement, an effectiveness criterion is needed (does the

school achieve better student outcomes?) as well as an improvement criterion (does

the school manage change successfully?) (Hoeben, 1998). It is the final objective of

the ESI project to develop a model and/or strategy for effective school improvement.

The design of such a model took place in different steps: A draft model based on

analysis of theory and empirical research, was tested based against a (re)analysis of

improvement projects in the participating countries. The results of this empirical

testing was the input for a redraft of the model that was discussed with academics,

practitioners, and policy-makers in the participating countries. Their critique and

comments were taken into account by the project team in the final design of the

model.

The Effectiveness School Improvement Project originally consisted of two related

research tasks, namely:

1. The analysis, evaluation, and synthesis of theories that might be useful for

effective school improvement.

2. The inventory, analysis, and evaluation of effective school improvement

programmes in different European countries.

In the course of the project, it turned out that the development of the model in

these different phases was more complicated than expected and this became a

separate research task. The draft model was discussed at conferences of prac-

titioners, policy-makers, and researchers in each of the countries and the results

were the input for a final meeting of the research teams, resulting in rejection of the

idea of a model and development of a comprehensive framework for effective school

improvement.

Linking School Effectiveness and School Improvement 361

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In the following sections, the outline/design for tasks 1 and 2 will be described. The

results of the analysis of theories and improvement projects will be presented in

separate contributions in this volume. The development of the comprehensive

framework itself will be discussed in the final contribution.

Theoretical Analysis of Effective School Improvement

The theoretical analysis for useful insights for effective school improvement

incorporated different points of view: (1) the integration of the school effectiveness

and school improvement traditions; (2) the search for additional insights in other

theoretical traditions such as: organisational theories, curriculum theories, beha-

vioural theories, and theories of organisational learning and human resources

management (Hoeben, 1998; Reezigt, 2000). These theories were selected based on

the expectation that they could provide concepts and relations between concepts

concerning the complex process of school improvement where educational issues

(such as the curriculum) and the organisation (of schools) and behaviour of

participants are at stake.

Integration of the Improvement and Effectiveness Traditions

The primary criterion, or dependent variable, to be explained theoretically, is the

output criterion from the educational effectiveness tradition. Most effectiveness

research defines the output criterion as achievement in basic cognitive skills. A

theoretical framework that offers a step forward needs to broaden the traditional

concept of school and classroom effectiveness from achievement scores in basic

school subjects to a new operational definition of educational effectiveness in terms of

the realisation of other and more ambitious cognitive and metacognitive goals. These

might be problem-solving, creative thinking, and other higher cognitive skills, transfer

of knowledge, or learning to learn. In contrast to most effectiveness research, which is

mainly directed at—operationally defined—basic skills, many innovative efforts in

education are deeply concerned with more ambitious kinds of—conceptually

indicated—goals (Fullan, 1991). Because school and classroom factors may be

correlated more strongly with basic skills than with higher cognitive skills, there seems

to be a central problem in combining both traditions. The theoretical analysis has to

address this issue. Although less outcome oriented, most improvement research

implies that other kinds of achievement may be as important, or more important than,

basic cognitive skills. In order to combine the effectiveness and the improvement

traditions successfully, therefore, the output criterion has to be broadened to include other

achievements implying higher order cognitions and metacognitions.

A theoretical framework also has to deal with the problem of influences of the

contexts on effective school improvement. Theories of educational change and school

improvement are sensitive to contextual differences. They link them to innovative

strategies, but not to educational effectiveness. School effectiveness research has

coined a concept of differential school effectiveness, and has the methodology to research


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the problem (Jesson & Gray, 1991; Nuttall, Goldstein, Prosser, & Rasbash, 1989),

but has, at this moment, no theory to explain different school effects in different

contexts (Scheerens, 1993). Contingency theory, central in the study of organisa-

tions, assumes there is no best way to make an organisation effective; which one of

several ways to be effective is contingent upon situational and contextual factors

(Mintzberg, 1979). A comprehensive theoretical framework of school effectiveness

and school improvement may combine these elements to develop hypotheses about

contextual differences, innovation strategies, and differential school effectiveness.

When these problems are solved, the theoretical framework has to find ways to

combine the knowledge about ‘‘what works’’ that is offered by research on

educational effectiveness, with the knowledge and experiences needed to change

education which is offered by school improvement.

The school effectiveness knowledge base makes clear which characteristics or

factors are important for effectiveness at different levels of the system (student,

learning, teaching, school, and context). Overviews based on theoretical considera-

tions and empirical findings were given by, amongst others, Levine and Lezotte

(1990), Creemers (1994a), Sammons, Hillman, and Mortimore (1995), Scheerens

and Bosker (1997), and Teddlie and Reynolds (2000). Stoll and Wikeley (1998) make

clear that school improvement efforts over the years have become more focused on

effectiveness issues such as teaching and learning processes and student outcomes.

Although school improvement may concern the school level or the teacher level (e.g.,

school improvement can be directed at the school organisation or at classroom

management), its main goal must essentially be stated in terms of student outcomes.

Although it may not be very important as to where changes are actually initiated (for

example at the level of the central government, or at the level of the individual school),

it seems more important as to whether a school is able to take charge of changes. A

school must be ready for change and show some signs of an ownership mentality.

For school improvement to be successful, the issue of school culture should not be

neglected. When the school structure is changing (which is often a sign of school

improvement) while the school culture does not change, the danger of short-lived and

superficial changes is real. For school improvement to occur, characteristics of the

school culture must be favourable. Schools, for example, must have shared goals and

feel responsible for success. Other requirements are collegiality, risk taking, mutual

respect and support, openness, and an attitude of lifelong learning.

A possible link between school effectiveness and school improvement may occur

through the school development planning process. In the description of this process

(Stoll & Wikeley, 1998), the concepts mentioned above (focus on effectiveness issues,

readiness for change, ownership mentality, and a favourable school culture) all have

their own place. A new dimension is provided by the four-stage cycle of needs

assessment, planning, implementation, and evaluation that underlies all change

processes. Attention is drawn to the fact that someone must start this cycle and keep

the school going as well during all the stages of the continuous cycle.

In the definition of comprehensive school reform, components stemming from the

two traditions are integrated. The meta-analysis of Borman, Hewes, Overman, and


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Brown (2003) provides evidence for the integration of ‘‘proven’’ components,

characteristics, and factors suggested in the definition and advocated in publications

on the merger of school effectiveness and school improvement (Gray et al., 1999;

Reynolds et al., 2000).

Additional Insights From Other Theoretical Traditions

The analysis of the available literature on the merging of effectiveness and

improvement pointed to the importance of the context for improvement. The study

of organisations which resulted in contingency theory (Mintzberg, 1979) offered

interesting perspectives for effective school improvement. Most of the literature in

this area stems from specific educational theories and research. To avoid a restricted

scope on effectiveness, and the factors that might enhance effectiveness and

improvement, the review and analysis of the literature was extended to other

orientations within education (the theories on curriculum and curriculum imple-

mentation and on related disciplines in psychology and sociology). The theories that

originally are included below will be presented shortly, with respect to the expected

outcomes of the analysis of the literature in the specific field for criteria and factors for

effective school improvement. In the contribution of Scheerens and Demeuse in this

issue, the results of the analysis for the development of the theoretical framework are

presented.

Organisational theories. In organisational theories, three other effectiveness criteria or

perspectives are used:

1. adaptability or responsiveness to external circumstances or changes;

2. continuity of the organisation in terms of stability of the internal structure and

acquisition of resources;

3. commitment and satisfaction of the members of the organisation (Fairman &

Quinn, 1985).

These three perspectives are also embedded in theories of educational change and

improvement as supportive conditions (Fullan, 1991). In school effectiveness theories

too, they are interpreted as supportive conditions and brought into means-goal

relationships with the primary criterion of output effectiveness (Scheerens, 1992,

1993). Adaptability and continuity of the school organisation, and the commitment

and satisfaction of its members, will be treated as conditions that indirectly support

educational effectiveness by stimulating the school organisation and its members to

work towards effective school improvement.

Curriculum theories. Curriculum theories provide other models that link the school as

an organisation to the work of teachers. Curricula are documents that should, or

might, be used in educational practice: They could be formulated as guidelines at the

national level for education in schools and classrooms, but usually curricula are


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reflected in the textbooks for students and teachers. Curriculum theories deal with

the characteristics of curricula in relation to the implementation of curricula and the

outcomes in student achievement. Examples are curriculum implementation strategies,

such as the fidelity perspective, the mutual adaptation perspective or strategies of

curriculum enactment; other examples are models of control, varying from central

control—the central office of the school or even the central government—to models

of empowerment of teachers (Fullan, 1991; Fullan & Pomfret, 1977; Simons, 1990;

Snyder, Bolin, & Zumwalt, 1992).

Behavioural theories. Schools do not change if the people within the schools,

particularly the teaching staff, do not change. ‘‘In the final analysis it is the actions of

the individuals that count’’ (Fullan, 1991, p. 77). Behavioural theories in (social)

psychology explain work towards changes in behaviour by stressing the mechanisms of

evaluation, feedback, and reinforcement (Carver & Sergiovanni, 1969; Debus & Schroiff,

1986). These mechanisms work in explaining and improving effective instruction in

classrooms (Creemers, 1994b) and in explaining and improving the impact of

curricula on achievement (Hoeben, 1994). Rational control of organisations that

depends on monitoring, evaluation, and appraisal of the functioning of the (people

within) organisations, also comes close to the findings of school effectiveness research

which consistently demonstrates that evaluation and assessment are associated with

high achievement (Scheerens, 1994).

Organisational learning theories. Organisational learning is involved in all processes of

adaptation to a changing environment, and in processes of purposeful change to

improve a school’s effectiveness (Louis, 1994). Learning of educational organisations

may be conceptualised by information richness, organisational procedures of

processing and interpreting information, procedures for evaluation and monitoring,

interpersonal networks of sharing and discussing information, and organisations as

makers of meaning by incremental adaptation, intellectual learning style, and

assumption sharing (Lundberg, 1989; Senge, 1990).

A special point of view is provided by the realisation that the productive work in

educational organisations is being done by highly trained professionals with a high

degree of autonomy, which is consistent with the view that organisational learning

requires considerable decentralisation (Fullan, Bennett, & Rolheiser-Bennett, 1990).

Learning by educational organisations may be studied specifically by analysing

their evaluation and monitoring processes and their staff development: that is, the

ways they determine their training needs and the ways they organise the training of

the staff.

In the analysis, these theories were related to each other and to a starting

framework comprising school effectiveness and school improvement. It was expected

that through the analysis, comparisons, and relationships an initial theoretical

framework would yield important factors for effective school improvement to be

included in a more elaborate model. This model will be combined with the results of

the second task: the evaluation of effective school improvement projects.


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The Evaluation of Effective School Improvement Projects

Inventory of projects. Comprehensive overviews of programmes that link educational

effectiveness and school improvement are available in the contributions to the

annual meetings of the ICSEI. The first congress was held in the United Kingdom

(London, 1988; Reynolds, Creemers, & Peters, 1989). Since then, a conference has

been held each year in another part of the world, and many contributions focus on

experiences in innovative programmes combining improvement and effectiveness

(for examples worldwide, see Townsend, Clarke, & Ainscow, 1999). Case studies

include Houtveen and Osinga (1995), Stoll and Fink (1992), Stoll et al. (1996),

Stringfield, Bedinger, and Herman (1995), and Townsend (1995). Because the

participating countries were not equally represented in ICSEI, the first step was an

inventory of possible projects for further analysis. The selection and description of

these projects needed an evaluation framework that guaranteed that in the analysis

of the project, the required information would be available (Hoeben, 1998).

Key questions were outlined in the evaluation framework (see Table 1), and each

of the questions included a range of subthemes that were investigated during the

case studies. When the information was not available on any one project, the

country teams gathered further evidence and further information. Where

insufficient information was available, the team made a decision as to whether

that project was to be included. After an initial presentation of possible projects to

the whole team, the country teams made a final selection of projects with at least

one (but preferably more) from secondary education. Sometimes the school

improvement project would be just one school, but more often schools, as units of

change, were part of a larger school improvement project together with other

schools.

Selection, data collection, and analysis. In the selection of the school improvement

projects for the analysis, it emerged that there were great differences between

improvement projects within the ESI project (for more detail see Stoll, Wikeley, &

Reezigt, 2002), for example with respect to:

. the available information regarding the improvement project, and especially the

processes in the school, the classroom, and the student results;

. goals of the improvement programmes, especially student results or intermediate

goals;

. the scale of the programme, macro and/or micro;

. the improvement technology used;

. the theoretical orientation of improvement projects;

. the theoretical notions related to the goals of improvement;

. the number of schools and students involved in the study.

However, the improvement programmes in the different countries all had some

common characteristics such as:


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. all had the school as the target for improvement and, therefore, as the unit of

analysis;

. ultimately they all intended to change, or to improve, student outcomes;

. all had intermediate goals on the level of the teacher, the curriculum, the school

organisation et cetera, in order to achieve the ultimate goals;

. (according to the guidelines for selection) there was information available about

the process.

Analysis was undertaken to find the factors promoting or hindering effective school

improvement in each specific country, and information about the educational systems

in each country was used to contextualise each country’s findings. Case studies were

written of each programme (De Jong, 2000), and country teams paired up to analyse

similarities and differences between the programmes, using a rating instrument

(Stoll et al., 2002). Whether the factors worked in the same way in different countries

was also explored. This was important for constructing an ESI model, especially

if they pointed to factors different from those derived from the theoretical analyses

and also because they helped the research team to understand how the factors worked

in practice.

Table 1. Key questions in ESI Evaluation Framework

1. To what extent do the student outcomes provide evidence for the school’s effectiveness in

attaining its goals?

2. To what extent do the intermediate outcomes provide evidence for the attainment of the

school’s improvement goals?

3. To what extent do the students show increased engagement with their own learning and

their learning environment?

4. To what extent does the curriculum in the classrooms contribute to the school’s attainment

of students’ goals?

5. To what extent does the cycle of improvement planning, implementation, evaluation, and

feedback contribute to the school’s attainment of its improvement goals?

6. To what extent does the school’s curriculum—where applicable—contribute to the

effectiveness of the classroom curriculum?

7. To what extent does the school’s organisation contribute to the attainment of intermediate

improvement goals and students’ goals?

8. To what extent does parental choice and involvement contribute to the school’s

responsiveness and to its attainment of intermediate improvement goals and students’

goals?

9. To what extent does the learning by the school organisation contribute to the school’s

management of change, i.e. to the attainment of the intermediate improvement goals?

10. To what extent do external change agents contribute to the school’s attainment of

intermediate improvement goals?

11. To what extent do the contextual characteristics allow for, stimulate, or hinder ESI, i.e., the

attainment of intermediate improvement goals and of the students’ goals? For instance: To

what extent does the national curriculum, where applicable, allow for, stimulate, or hinder

ESI?


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Conclusion

The results of the analysis of the theoretical traditions in school effectiveness and

improvement together with further insights that could be useful in the understanding

of a complicated process as effective school improvement were combined with the

outcomes of the analysis of projects in the field of school improvement which

addressed—mostly to a certain degree and in different ways—the effectiveness

criterion (student outcomes) as well as the improvement criterion (school’s capacity

to manage change). This resulted in a draft model for effective school improvement

which was discussed within the participating countries and using the reports of these

discussions, within the research team. In the discussions, it became evident that the

(draft) model could not serve as an explanatory model for ESI in all the participating

countries. The reasons were twofold; the complexity of ESI and the contextual

differences between countries.

ESI turned out to be not only far more complicated than was expected but also

more complex than represented in the theoretical traditions. This not only holds for

the combination of effectiveness and improvement, the topic of this research, but also

for the other contributing traditions. Both educational effectiveness and improvement

need further theoretical and empirical research with respect to their interrelationship.

Important issues for further development are the outcomes, inputs, and processes

and how to develop or install the processes in learning environments (classes) and

schools. Furthermore, ESI takes place in a context. Contextual factors such as the

degree of autonomy and the availability of the resources have a major effect on ESI.

These contexts were different in each participating country. The variability of the

contexts in the different countries meant that ESI could take different forms. In a

situation of strict centralisation, ESI is perceived as the reform of the (national)

system and there is no ESI at the level of individual schools. In most countries,

however, schools have the room and the responsibility for their own development

(through ESI). Furthermore, it can be expected that contextual factors more or less

determine which factors ‘‘work’’ at the school and classroom levels.

Further development of ESI theories and empirical research related to these

theories in different educational contexts, preferably through international compara-

tive research, is needed for the next attempt to develop a model for effective school

improvement. Maybe ESI was too early.

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linking school effectiveness and school improvement: the background and outline of the project

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