School effects on students' achievement are relatively small. Another approach, in which students' growth trajectories are the focal point of interest, is able to demonstrate more sizeable school effects. This approach is applied in a study into school compositional effects. The rationale of this study is that in Dutch primary education such compositional effects may not show up, because schools that have a disproportiate number of students from low socioeconomic families, especially if they are ethnic minorities, receive extra funding. The extra staff that they can hire should then at least counterbalance the negative school compositional effects. The study shows that growth of students is curvilinear, rather than linear, and that school effects on students' growth trajectories indeed are sizeable. School compositional effects could not be demonstated, which might be interpreted in a positive way: The extra staffing may indeed counterbalance potential compositional effects. Implications of the findings are discussed.

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This paper examines the influence of different social contexts of schooling on the effectiveness of schools, and is based on the premise that higher organizational levels influence all that takes place in the levels below them. This research depicts the core levels of school governance, school community, classroom culture, and their impact on student learning, and specifically studies the influence of the administrative and governance structures of public and private schools on the underlying level of the community of these schools. In turn, it is expected that the school community influences the educational culture of the primary learning process of pupils in classrooms. The results of multilevel analyses show that the differences in the maths achievement of pupils can be explained, in part, by these social contexts of learning. Furthermore, the findings show that coherence between school governors, school leaders, teachers and the school community (parents) produces a sense of community that, in turn, shapes conditions in schools that have a positive effect on pupil achievement. Differential effects of schooling in public and private education are mediated by the school governance characteristics of these schools, especially the differences in influences of the school community (parents) on the policy of the school board.

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