The research study of effectiveness of secondary school in Serbian education system is based on Mortimore definition of the effective school as a school “in which students progress further than might be expected with respect to its intake” (Mortimore, 1998, p. 258). In such school, students’ outcomes are higher compared to the outcomes of students from other school enrolling students with similar cultural, social and economic background (Sammons, 1999, p. 76). Several decades of searching for critical set of characteristics of the effective school have suggested long list of good candidates which could be divided in different wider categories like these ones proposed by Edmonds (1979) – leadership, instructional focus, safe and ordered environment, high expectations, and using student achievements for monitoring school success. On the other side, school improvement literature put the stress on the role of school culture although this concept is associated with very vast set of meanings including vision, mission, values, and beliefs related to education, teaching, learning, and mutual relationship between key actors within the school. A qualitative study involving focus groups with students, parents, and teachers on teaching/learning in Serbian secondary education school suggested that key problem in some schools is related with school culture – students do not believe that education is important for their future success in life, they do not have sense of belonging to their school, in such context students see different forms of cheating as purposeful, and naturally it is followed with teachers lack of trust in students and their interest and motivation in learning. Students’ widespread deceiving of the education system, and its acceptance and passive (and sometimes even active) promotion by teachers and parents is one of the most alarming findings of the qualitative study - students cheat at exams using a plethora of traditional (crib notes) and modern technologies (cell phones and other electronic devices). Cheating at school is not considered dishonorable among the students and their parents alike. On the contrary, helping your colleague to cheat is taken as a sure proof of friendship and altruism; a sure way to gain and uphold peer popularity. There is almost no punishment, and certainly no moral outrage by the elders. Parents even help sometimes their children to obtain bogus medical excuses and teachers turn a blind eye on truancy and cheating. Academic dishonesty, with all its devastating consequences, is so deeply ingrained in the very fabric of the society that teachers alone can’t possibly wage and win the battle against it. Such school culture creates a kind of “vicious circle” where teachers employs more and more control and punishment strategies and student becoming more and more alienated and unmotivated for learning. The main goal of quantitative study following the qualitative study was to sort out in what extent four variables related to issues mentioned above (value of education, sense of belonging at school, culture of cheating, and teachers’ implicit theories) can explain between school variance among Serbian secondary school.

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