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J Pers Eval Educ (2007) 20:129145
DOI 10.1007/s11092-007-9049-0
Received: 15 November 2007 / Accepted: 13 December 2007 / Published online: 10 January 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007
Abstract This paper discusses the concept of school-based management (SBM), often also called whole school reform. The paper is in four sections: (1) A description and discussion of what is meant by school-based management; (2) a review of the literature about its implementation; (3) a review of its effects on students; and (4) some general conclusions. The main arguments are that SBM is a concept of modest entitivity and that this contributes to the only modest achievement effects that have been attributed to SBM reforms to date when higher quality evaluations are performed.
Keywords Evaluation . Whole school reform . Comprehensive school reform . School based management . Comer . Achievement . Education . Urban school reform
1 What is School-Based Management?
The discussion is in three parts: the core idea, the usually postulated causal theory, and the components required for faithful implementation.
1. The Core Idea. In the USA, consensus is universal that the core feature of SBM (also known as whole school reform) is an increase in decision-making at the local school level. This is in distinction to decision-making at the government level (national or local) or at the level of the classroom teacher.
In identifying individual schools as the crucial levers for educational policy change, SBM does not assume that the decision-making roles of government and
A draft of this paper was presented at the World Bank, Washington, DC, March 2007.
T. D. Cook (*)
Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 2040 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208, USAe-mail: [email protected]
School Based Management: A Concept of Modest Entitivity with Modest Results
Thomas D. Cook
130 J Pers Eval Educ (2007) 20:129145
individual teachers will then become zero. Public schools will always exist in some larger policy and administrative context that affects their operations. This is even true for private schools, though government control will typically be less for them. The key is to identify what the government role in decision-making should be without assuming it can be zero. Something similar is true at the classroom level. No change in administration is...