Abstract

This paper reports a qualitative multiple case study of secondary schools that experienced sustained processes of quality improvement. We aimed to analyse the heterogeneity in school improvement processes and identify the factors and conditions contributing to this variation. We identified six dimensions to characterize different approaches to high school improvement: curriculum comprehensiveness, student selection/inclusion, student participation and youth cultures, leadership distribution, community openness, and market situation. Based on our cross-case analysis, we proposed an empirically grounded typology composed by four high school profiles: i) traditional academically oriented public high schools; ii) comprehensive high schools from small communities; iii) restrictive metropolitan popular high schools; and iv) vocational high schools. We show the implications of this typology for understanding how high schools actively relate to both their contexts and educational policy, and 'translated' these external pressures into idiosyncratic responses. We found that key educational decisions such as curricular approaches and the various emphases placed on learning by high schools, the type of organisational leadership or degree of openness to youth participation, were linked to more structural decisions made by schools regarding their position in the local educational market, their degree of selectivity, and the type of relationships established with their environment.