The authors examine a broad range of Catholic high schools to determine whether or not students are better educated in these schools than they are in public schools. They find that the Catholic schools do have an independent effect on achievement, especially in reducing disparities between disadvantaged and privileged students. The Catholic school of today, they show, is informed by a vision, similar to that of John Dewey, of the school as a community committed to democratic education and the common good of all students.

New edition of a text in which Raudenbush (U. of Michigan) and Bryk (sociology, U. of Chicago) provide examples, explanations, and illustrations of the theory and use of hierarchical linear models (HLM). New material in Part I (Logic) includes information on multivariate growth models, an expanded number of illustrative examples, further data analy

In 1988, the Chicago public school system decentralized, granting parents and communities significant resources and authority to reform their schools in dramatic ways. To track the effects of this bold experiment, the authors of Organizing Schools for Improvement collected a wealth of data on elementary schools in Chicago. Over a seven-year period they identified one hundred elementary schools that had substantially improved-and one hundred that had not. What did the successful schools do to accelerate student learning?

The authors of this illuminating book identify a...

As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. InLearning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than implementing fast and learning slow, they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to learn fast to implement well. Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to...