What happens to youth in foster care when they turn 18? Many face unprecedented challenges like homelessness, lack of financial resources, difficulty accessing educational opportunities, and unemployment. In this issue brief, The American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) document these challenges and opportunities in three distinct yet overlapping areas…

The problem that this correlational quantitative survey research study sought to examine was whether perceived secondary school teacher self-efficacy, in terms of collaboration, was related to the level of implementation of inclusion practices within special education classrooms. The purpose of this study was to contribute to researchers'…

For the leader of an early childhood program, the ability to delegate is an important skill to develop. Increased staff motivation, increased competence, and more vibrant connections between team members are just some of the positive benefits that can occur when delegation is used as a leadership tool. Delegating is not about dumping work on…

Through the process of initiating, implementing, and sustaining a schoolwide professional learning community (PLC), teachers and administrators at the pseudonymous Silver Valley Middle School provide a powerful example of distributed leadership in action. New leadership roles, coordination, and interdependency among staff have led to an increased…

Key legislative objectives of charter schools are to provide more school and classroom options, increase teacher influence over decision making, and increase school autonomy from state and district policy. Using national data from the 2003-4 School and Staffing Survey, we found that charter schools attained these legislative objectives when…

The study attempts to address the gap of exploring the possible antecedents of employees' commitment to change and its three dimensions. The role of context factors--participation in decision making, quality of communication, trust in management and history of change--are tested on overall commitment to change and also on its three…

This paper focuses on intercultural competence and dialogue across cultural borders between university students from different Portuguese-speaking countries. Various principles and strategies for intercultural education are summarised, and the project "cultures@esec", based on such principles and strategies, is described. The project was…

This article reports on a national study examining the characteristics of effective school principals which reveals that high student achievement is directly linked to "collective leadership"--the shared influence of educators, parents, stakeholders, and community members. The five-year study, commissioned by the Wallace Foundation and…

The Open Book, an adult literacy program in Brooklyn, from 1985-2002, remains, for many of the students and staff involved, a defining experience in their lives, a time that allowed them to see different possibilities, for themselves and society. In an attempt to preserve the field's collective historical memory, the authors in this chapter…

This study, which was funded by the office of research and development (ORD) in the University of Botswana, surveyed 65 primary schools in South Central region in Botswana, which aimed at establishing the perceptions of senior management teams dominant leadership style. The study was done in three phases; the first phase started in June 2008 to…

Professional, knowledge-based institutions have a particular form of organization and culture that makes special demands on the strategic planning supervised by research administrators and managers. A model for dynamic strategic planning based on a pragmatic utilization of the multitude of strategy models was used in a small university-affiliated…

This article provides a longitudinal analysis of leadership. In the first section of the article, the evidence reviewed indicates how, historically, leadership has been significant in various societal arrangements in the co-ordination of actions for collective purposes. Such co-ordination may also be facilitated through self-organisation, except…

This paper examines the collaborative relationship between principals and School Governing Bodies (SGBs), and how this impacts on the management of financial resources in public schools. In South Africa, educational trends such as decentralisation, the shift of responsibility in roles, community involvement, building of partnerships and…

This is a case study demonstrating the impact the co-operative movement has had on one co-operative school in south-west England. Lipson Co-operative Academy in Plymouth was one of the first schools to convert to become a co-operative school in 2009. The article has been co-written by members of the Academy and focuses on three transformational…

This article describes how the Portuguese National Council for Education initiated a participatory process that gave rise to the development of a "public statement", "The Education for Children from Zero to Six Years". This statement and its 11 recommendations were directed towards the Ministry of Education and called for a…