The fundamental job of school board members is to view themselves as moral and cultural leaders and to transform the needs of groups to a higher and more noble framework. Lists the National School Boards Association's statement on the governance role of the local school board. (MLF)

In 1969 after an intense political campaign, three Mexican Americans won seats on the board of trustees of the Cucamonga (California) School District--the Chicano Movement's first successful effort at community control of a school board. Political organizing strategies, community-initiated self-help projects, the new board's educational reforms,…

This book focuses on the question of how citizen participation affects the making of the school budget, the crucial controlling instrument of modern bureaucratic organizations. The four communities studied differed in size, social and economic characteristics, and form of government. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and begins the discussion of the…

Even though public school districts are structured with the expectation of responsive governance, most school boards are not particularly responsive to their constituents. School boards from politically contentious districts tend to be more responsive, but they have even less success challenging the dominance of the superintendent than do less…

This study finds that the New York City version of school-based decision making, School-Based Management/Shared Decision Making (SBM/SDM), fails to bring school-based management or shared decision making to the schools. This report begins by describing the seriously dysfunctional structure of the New York City public schools and explains the…

Effective strategies for assisting Canadian Native communities to develop school boards included encouraging an unhurried adaptive learning process, providing guidance to achieve consensus, and allowing for an incubation period. Impediments to development included community members' avoidance of leadership roles, cross-cultural misunderstandings,…

A historical analysis of the ways in which representatives of the business and professional communities were able to control the development of a city school system, based on documentation from the 1920's to the late 1960's in the Cincinnati, Ohio, school system. (Author/DCS)

This paper discusses the impact that recent educational reforms by the New Zealand government had on Maori individuals involved in community decision-making processes, focusing on one predominantly Maori rural community. Three strands of recent educational change in New Zealand are the move to self-managing institutions; ongoing debate over…

If needed significant educational change is to be achieved, some countervailing power source capable of confronting administrative bureaucracy and making it conform to the present needs of the public must be established. Community control, the subdivision of the large system into appropriate communities and the control of each community by its…

In focusing on local school board response to citizen desires for change in public school operations and on significant issues changing education from the perspective of school boards, three principles must be kept in mind: (1) public schools are controlled by three arms of government at three levels; (2) the federal government has limited powers;…

The belief that structural change providing for the representation of minority parents in urban school districts would improve educational services for their children has led to an emphasis on school-system controlled or affiliated channels for participation. This emphasis, based on assumptions about parent participation in suburban districts, has…