Angelo Paletta

Public Governance and School Performance

Abstract According to the New Public Governance paradigm, this paper analyses the institutional and organizational conditions that can lead to an improvement in student learning (a typical co-produced outcome) by acting on the promotion of genuine collaborative relationships. The distinctive features of Italian distributed governance and the challenges for school management are discussed by examining TIMSS and INVALSI data. The results show that collaborative public management supports schools in improving student learning, confirming the research hypothesis for primary schools (IV grade) and schools that operate in socially and economically poor contexts.

Managing Student Learning: Schools as Multipliers of Intangible Resources.

The conceptual categories that underlie the business analysis of intellectual capital are relevant to providing an explanation of school performance. By gathering data on student learning, this research provides empirical evidence for the use of school results as an accurate indicator of the effectiveness of the management of public education. This article concludes that schools are essentially knowledge-based organizations, but that is not enough for them to operate as effective learning organizations.

Improving Students’ Learning Through School Autonomy: Evidence From the International Civic and Citizenship Survey

This article investigates the effect of school autonomy on multiple measures of student achievement, combining the individual data of the students participating in the International Civics and Citizenship Survey with their results in the national high stakes standardized tests at the end of eighth grade administered by the Italian National Institute for Educational Evaluation. In general, the results are consistent with previous findings suggesting that the success of decentralization policies in education depends not just on formally granting more autonomy to schools; autonomy can be a prerequisite to laying out a number of institutional (outside the school) and organizational (internal to each school) changes that may lead to the improvement of student achievement.

Networking for the Turnaround of a School District The Boston University—Chelsea Partnership

The 20-year partnership between Boston University and the school district of Chelsea, Massachusetts, came to an official end in June 2008. Although the partnership is by many measures successful, the continued success of the district will depend on how well Boston University is able to share with stakeholders management techniques and the intellectual capital that the university helped to accumulate and produce. This article discusses how the partnership provided for Chelseas future by working with stakeholders to promote student achievement and to capitalize on a network of private and nonprofit institutions to improve the school system.

Governance and Leadership in Public Schools: Opportunities and Challenges Facing School Leaders in Italy

ABSTRACT This article aims to explore the evolution of school leadership in Italy toward a model of leadership for learning. Italy is undergoing radical changes in the governance structures (school autonomy and accountability) affecting schools in general, and school principals in particular, based on the way they promote, manage, and monitor the improvement of student learning. This has created an interesting, fertile ground for researchers to review how the policy-mandated initiatives are impacting on leadership for learning in schools. This article addresses two main questions. The first question explores how the new governance structures facilitate or impede an effective approach to leadership for learning. The second question explores whether the accountability reforms acknowledge and respect the history and traditions in which leadership is culturally embedded. This article concludes by presenting the implications for future policy initiatives based on the need to link school accountability and school improvement.

The challenges of Catholic education: evidence from the responses to the Instrumentum Laboris ‘Educating today and tomorrow’

This article is based on the analysis of the responses to the questionnaires submitted for the Instrumentum Laboris ‘Educating today and tomorrow. A renewing passion’ and sets out to offer a synthesis of the main challenges facing Catholic education around the world, key criticalities as well as more positive aspects and the strategic and operational areas foreseen for the future. The questionnaires were analysed using a mixed quantitative and qualitative method, supported by the use of a semantic language analysis software (T-LAB). The results of the study led to the conclusion that many of the challenges outlined by the Instrumentum Laboris can be traced to a single matrix: to make an integral model of youth education sustainable, preserving the institutional identity of Catholic schools and universities as educational communities of evangelisation.