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In many countries, including Greece, women are underrepresented in school management positions. Modern societies recognize sex inequalities in management as a significant social problem and implement human resource policies intended to reduce such problems. The purpose of this paper is to assess the level of gender inequality in the recent selection procedure for public school advisors in Greece and to compare the performance of women and men on the different selection criteria.

The paper compares the scores of male and female teachers in the national assessment of the Greek Ministry of Education, during the 2007 secondary education selection procedure. The data for the 2007 assessment procedure for the selection of secondary education school advisors were obtained. There were 1,137 candidates of whom 404 were selected as school advisors. These groups were analysed and grouped according to different criteria: sex, postgraduate qualifications, work experience, and score in a written examination. The differences in scores between groups were tested for statistical significance using a one‐way analysis of variance. A regression analysis was conducted to investigate the possible relationship between the score before the interview of female and male candidates and the score in the interview process.

The results indicate that the number of women candidates is lower than the expected number according to the proportion of women and men teachers in secondary education in Greece. Both men and women candidates appear to have scored the highest percentage of their credit points from the interview and not from the other selection criteria. Women achieved significantly better scores in knowledge of foreign languages and the scientific criteria, whereas men scored better in the publication of educational books. Prior to the interview assessment, women scored better than men. After the interview assessment, there were no gender‐related differences. For both men and women, the interview score was not related to the score on the other selection criteria. There is no evidence that women do not posses the average qualifications or merit to be selected as school advisors.

This paper is the first to investigate the elements of gender inequality in the selection procedure for secondary education school advisors in Greece.

Greece had to undertake several reforms under intense policy conditionality pressures – stemming from the three financial support programs agreed between the Greek Government and the Troika – and political instability. Within this context, this study aims to analyze the role of politicians and technical assistance staff in the administrative reform of the Greek state budget.

The study adopts the approach of an extreme country-case study which is analyzed through a theoretical framework with insights from the resource dependency theory and the concept of policy conditionality. The theoretical framework is supported by documents of the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission, including the technical Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and their progress reports and is informed by the outcome of interviews with General Accounting Office executives.

While the budget reform eventually met the MoU requirements, the frequent changes at the government level, the constant renegotiations with the Troika that initiated changes to the plan and the instability of the technical assistance teams formed to support the reform contributed to important implementation delays.

The study contributes to the research agenda on accounting reforms during periods of financial crises by providing evidence on the role of politicians’ level of ownership and technical assistance staff contribution.

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the role of context in the identification of learning disabilities (LD) within the responsiveness-to-intervention (RTI) model. In Study 1, using a sample of students with and without LD (N=167) and data from a reading assessment, we tested whether the decision making regarding literacy disabilities is significantly different if we take into account variability within the schools and school characteristics. Initially a logistic multilevel model was fit to the data to assess prevalence rates of LD identification. The validity of these estimates was substantiated by bootstrapping the sample's parameters using 1,000 replications and by evidencing negligible bias parameters. Subsequently, the relationship between reading ability and LD identification was established by means of a multilevel model including random effects. The significant slopes linking reading to LD identification (i.e., fluency and overall reading ability ratings by teachers) were predicted by cross-level interactions involving schools' location (rural, urban, and suburban). The results of Study 1 demonstrated the moderating role of school context, as the slopes linking fluency and reading achievement to LD placement were moderated by the area in which a school was located. Study 2 was designed to present a relative discrepancy identification model by taking into account information from the school (i.e., district). Using 29 students from one district, whose writing ability was evaluated three times within the semester, comparisons were made between a specific low-ability student and the rest of his/her class. Through fitting a multilevel model in which within-student and between-student variance was assessed, Study 2 demonstrated that the specific pattern of responsiveness of a target student can be tested against the norm of his/her school district in order to have a more sensitive relative criterion of what constitutes both responsiveness and the norm. Thus, by utilizing a multilevel framework that involves school characteristics into our assessment we demonstrated that decision making is much more informative and likely more “accurate” under the RTI model. Certainly more research is needed to verify the usefulness and applicability of the proposed “relative slope-difference discrepancy model.”