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n a nd sol bee JungThe Coleman Report argued that family background is a fundamental cause of educational outcomes, while demonstrating the weak predictive power of variation in expenditures and facilities. This paper investigates the effects of family background, expenditures, and the conditions of school facilities for the public high school class of 2004, first sampled in 2002 for the Education Longitudinal Study and then followed up in 2004, 2006, and 2012. The results demonstrate that expenditures and related school inputs have very weak associations not only with test scores in the sophomore and senior years of high school but also with high school graduation and subsequent college entry. Only for postsecondary educational attainment do we find any meaningful predictive power for expenditures, and here half of the association can be adjusted away by school-level differences in average family background. Altogether, expenditures and facilities have much smaller associations with secondary and postsecondary outcomes than many scholars and policy advocates assume. The overall conclusion of the Coleman Report-that family background is far and away the most important determinant of educational achievement and attainment-is as convincing today as it was fifty years ago.

In this chapter, the author engages in theory building based on the foundations provided by previous literature. Past studies on the impacts of school leadership through its connections to families and communities have often leaned on traditional notions of parent involvement in contrast to the ideas of equitable collaboration and authentic partnerships. The latter strives to address existing power differentials in schools through having traditionally underrepresented stakeholders serve as a core part of shaping school improvement and leading change. One of the key propositions of the distributed leadership framework is to shift the conceptualization of leadership from the actions tied to formal positions and titles to those of leading and influencing that occur within social interactions across the broader school community. In this framework, leadership is understood to be exercised by those who may not necessarily hold leadership titles but

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This study sought student voices to examine the key characteristics of an out-of-school learning experience, designed to provide enrichment to students with above grade level academic talent. Using open-ended questions on a program evaluation survey, the study gauged the perceptions of 205 students who partook in a university-based academic summer program in Greece. Data analysis took a content analysis approach, which identified the major themes of student perceptions regarding their program and in-course experiences. By triangulating these responses with student ratings of overall satisfaction, we found that the experience of novelty was a key factor that set apart highly satisfying program and course experiences from less satisfying experiences. Another key finding with implications for future program design was that students perceived and depicted such novelty in two distinct forms, namely, content novelty and pedagogical novelty.