Community schools are a sound education reform strategy that gets results. They start by asking local students and their families what they need to succeed in school, then they reach out to relevant community partners and use the school as the hub for organizing partnerships, services, and supports. By listening closely to the assets and needs of…

Framing communication into five strategies, we call upon our collective thirty years of public school administration and leadership identifying communication in the abstract and sharing application examples from practice. Together we have found that blending research and practice in the area of communication has proven to be successful in our…

One consequence of globalisation is the demand on academics to better prepare students for work and life in an interconnected world through curriculum internationalisation. Many academics are hesitant, resistant, or ill-prepared to engage with curriculum internationalisation. This paper explores how this can be addressed by reconfiguring the way…

This paper scrutinizes decentralization of education with reference to some countries around the world. We consider discussion on decentralization to be complex, critical and broad question in the contemporary education planning, administration and politics of education reforms. Even though the debate on and implementation of decentralization…

This chapter recounts the first 3 years of the Student Voice Collaborative (SVC) in New York City, a district supported student leadership initiative that engages high school aged youth in school reform work at school and district levels. Based on his experiences developing and running the SVC, the author identifies nine design and implementation…

We argue that improvisational theatre training creates a compelling experience of co-creation through interaction and, as such, can be used to build a distinctive kind of leadership skills. Theories of leadership as relational, collaborative or shared are in pointed contrast to traditional notions of an individual "hero leader" who possesses the…

At community colleges, just as at four-year institutions, a wide range of governance models exists, including those that claim to be shared governance but aren't, those that don't even pretend to be shared governance, and, occasionally, truly shared governance. True shared governance at community colleges, just as at their four-year counterparts,…

The impact of education decentralization on high-quality education has been mixed at best. This can be attributed to a variety of factors including decentralization itself, ineffectual implementation, political-economic friction, and poor design. This paper focuses largely on the issue of design, contending that if governments or donors aim to…

MBO (Management by objectives) was firstly put forward by Peter F. Drucker (who was a well-known scholar of management in America) in 1954. MBO was applied in many organizations after a number of management scholars developed and perfected it. MBO is a comprehensive and democratic systemic management style which is work-centered and…

Because educators continue to face challenges when seeking to educate all children, there is a growing recognition that schools must work with communities to maximize their collective educational potential (Murphy, Beck, Crawford, Hodges, & McGauphy, 2001). Although community schools are still in the emergent stages of development, their emphasis…

Higher education institutions are facing major challenges requiring traditional leadership and administrative policies and practices to be rethought and renewed. These challenges concern the whole academic community but mostly the institutions' administrative leaders. This article suggests how applying the democratic principles of…

Recently, the Petersburg (Virginia) Public Schools have moved away from a highly centralized organizational structure to a Total Quality Management system featuring shared decision making and school-based management practices. The district was guided by Deming's philosophy that all stakeholders should be involved in defining the level of products…

Planetary leadership (wanderers who seem to meander through their organizations making institutions work and change) can be a critical component of institutional change. Literature about management and organizational change is reviewed, and a case study of a major academic change at a public, suburban community college is discussed. (MLW)

The guide is designed to help states and localities create or strengthen their own youth councils. It is a synthesis of theory and practice that provides a general framework for thinking about youth councils, explaining the principles for youth action and the importance of youth engagement. It also incorporates advice and lessons from people in…

The "Seven S" framework developed by Pascale and Athos can be adapted to encompass both the technical and philosophical dimensions of organizational problem solving. For a community college, the seven elements of the model would be: (1) Superordinate goals--the significant meanings and guiding concepts that make up the philosophy of a…