With contributions from leading experts across disciplinary fields, this book explores best practices from the field's most notable researchers, as well as important historically based and politically focused challenges to a field whose impact has reached an important crossroads. The comprehensive and powerfully critical analysis considers the…

The purpose of the project was to identify common curricular needs among seven small contiguous midwestern school districts by means of parallel needs assessments conducted independently by each district. Operating under a state finance plan in which school spending is tied directly to student enrollment and faced with a decreasing number of…

The purpose of this competency-based education program is to help interested school districts implement, manage, and evaluate a comprehensive program at the high school level. The final report discusses the definition and collection of selective practices that have potential for further use; targeted development activities, including planning and…

The Bilingual Mini-Head Start program which offers service to migrant children and their families over a 6,000 mile circuit using a totally paraprofessional teaching staff, consists of 6 components: instruction, staff training, parent and community involvement, materials development, relocating delivery system, and management. An interim…

This school district guide examines the why of long-range planning, the relationship between long-range planning and educational change, the long-range planning process, community involvement in planning, the communicating of educational quality assessment and other needs assessment results with the public, needs assessment, prioritizing district…

The purpose of this manual is to provide guidelines and assistance to local education agency planners in the needs-assessment process. In the first section, the needs-assessment process is discussed within the overall framework of the program development cycle. Subsequent sections treat each step in the process, providing a model. Issues are…

The Bilingual Mini Head Start program is an early education program for children of migrant farm workers. The program has three permanent sites--two year-round sites in Washington which serve both mobile migrants and seasonal farm workers' children, and a home base site in Grulla, Texas which serves only mobile migrant children. Teachers from…

The deliberations of representatives from eleven Asian Unesco member countries focus on alternative approaches to identification of needs and resources as a basis for curriculum development, strategies and methodologies adopted in translating the curriculum into teaching learning materials and learning aids, training of teachers, problems involved…

In this paper, the author describes a game that is played by the school administration, faculty, staff, students, and parents in order to improve a school curriculum. The game gives all persons interested in the school an opportunity to "purchase" the kind of education they feel is needed. A player is given 20 Play money bills, each in the…

This proceedings summarizes a conference sponsored by the Center for Rural Education and Small Schools at Kansas State University. Included are the keynote speech and abstracts of 46 conference presentations. The keynote speech, "Invisible and Silent along the Blue Highways," by Patricia A. Schmuck, examines problems of ethnic, racial, and gender…

The setting of priorities among educational objectives is just as critical, and at least as difficult, as the selection of objectives. Information that is commonly used to make decisions about priorities involves: the needs of persons who will benefit from the school program; the resources available; and the knowledge of what payoffs are likely…

Montana, like other States throughout the nation, is trying to improve the quality and effectiveness of education. Currently, education in Montana is prescribed by State statutes and standards for school accreditation, which statutes and standards are also integral to school funding. The State Board, concurring with the Senate, concluded that…

This is the revised edition of a 1985 report providing a wide array of recommendations for improving state educational programs in Kentucky. This second edition is different from the first in the addition of notes on the status of recommendations, in the revision of data in various tables, and in the addition of an introduction summarizing events…

The development of a comprehensive state plan for arts education in Maryland is presented. The introduction states three program development goals and four major conclusions from a needs assessment of the mutual goals of the Maryland State Department of Education and the Maryland Alliance for Arts in Education. The goals include the development…

This manual examines components of a non-traditional adult high school program. It is intended to aid districts interested in establishing similar programs. The first of five parts defines the role of the weekend non-traditional high school as designed to meet the needs of undereducated adults who are unable to participate in evening high school…