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The aim of this study is to understand the strengths and weaknesses of schools and provide inputs to better inform both research and public policies. To address this aim, 258 low-achieving Chilean primary schools and their 1,266 teachers were analysed. On the basis of a multilevel latent class analysis, we found four profiles of teaching practices. The proportion of teachers in the high-quality teacher category is unexpectedly high (38.37%), followed by the low-quality (25.61%), content-oriented (18.91%), and climate-oriented (17.12%) categories. Finally, several school-level variables were tested to explore the link between school practices and teaching quality categories. The results show that the quality of the school's teaching practices related to their support for behavioural issues is associated with the probability of teachers belonging to the low-quality or climate-oriented categories. These findings can be valuable for policymaking, as they call for the development of strategies that strengthen teachers' capacities within schools.

In many countries, policy makers struggle with the development of value-added indicators of school performance for educational accountability purposes and in particular with the choice whether school context measured in the form of student composition variables should be included. This study investigates differences between 7 empirical studies that have looked at changes in value-added indicators through the inclusion of school composition variables. Differences were found in the strength of the association between Type A (student-level covariates) and Type B (student- and school-level covariates) school effect models in various regions, varying between 0.74 and 0.99 for secondary education. Important differences were found between the estimate of a school's effectiveness by using a Type A or a Type B value-added model in secondary education in The Netherlands, Belgium, Chile, and Australia and in US and UK primary education. However, few differences were found in other cases.