Using Multilevel Analysis to Assess School Effectiveness: A Study of Dutch Secondary Schools

This article is divided into three parts to show separate but related developments in the new generation of research on school effectiveness. The first part presents a historical overview of the development of this research from a narrow individualistic input-out approach to a more holistic approach that evaluates within-school processes. The second part reviews two competing theories of school effectiveness and the search for an appropriate analytic model. The third part describes a new way of analyzing hierarchically nested data by using a large data set of students from the different types of Dutch secondary schools and a statistical tool suited to analyzing the effects of selection policies in these schools. The results are compared with those of studies of the British and U.S. school systems. The author concludes that selective schools produce better results than do nonselective schools. Although the cause of this effect is not clear, the data support the hypothesis that the selection processes create a stimulating school climate, which, in turn, motivates students to achieve.