Public schools are functionally provided through structural arrangements such as government funding, but public schools are achieved in substance, in part, through local governance. In this essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz explains the bifocal nature of achieving public schools; that is, that schools are both subject to the unitary Public compact of…

As a part of Project USHER (Uniting Science and Humanness for Educational Redesign), a program is being carried out to increase the effectiveness of educational management in the nation's community colleges. The management model chosen to accomplish this goal unites the management-by-objectives model and the participative management model, and is…

Through participation in a Kettering Foundation project, the Lawrence North High School in suburban Indianapolis (Indiana) has successfully implemented a number of the management practices that apparently underlie the productivity of Japanese businesses. Led by the principal, the school has committed itself to four basic concepts from the Japanese…

This review of the literature focuses on the effects of enrollment and fiscal decline on local school district management and also looks at the effects of local districts' policy responses to decline. The review's five sections include an overview of the kinds of literature available on decline; a summary of the main policy issues identified in…