Findings of a survey conducted in 1989 to identify the difficulties facing educational practitioners when initiating shared decision making in school-based management are presented in this educational policy bulletin. The first of a two-issue report examined five of the eight major barriers to changing traditional behavior: fear of taking risks,…

An overview of school-based management (SBM) and the issues involved are provided in this document. Information is offered on the following topics: the advantages and liabilities of SBM; its effect on the roles of the school board, superintendent, and district office; decision-making processes; elements of SBM implementation; examples of three…

The literature on effective measures of enhancing the participation of organized labor in Total Quality Management (TQM) initiatives was reviewed. The literature was found to be limited in terms of specific discussion of labor union commitment to TQM; instead, authors and experts on the topic focused on the importance of employee involvement,…

Findings of a study that examined Chicago teachers' attitudes about school-based management are presented in this paper. A questionnaire was administered to 60 teachers in a Chicago public elementary school that had been involved in a restructuring program for 2 years. A majority of the teachers expressed positive opinions of the school-based…

An engineer/writer team approach to technical writing produces high quality papers intelligible to nonspecialists as it significantly reduces the amount of time the engineer must spend writing. The first step is transferring information from engineer to writer. A detailed outline is the most common form of initial input and can be presented to the…

Although personnel management in the public sector has become increasingly difficult because of recent social changes, more worker and middle management involvement in decision-making processes can improve all levels of personnel management. The social changes affecting personnel management have assumed three forms: (1) the entrance into the work…

Consensus decisionmaking is a tool which utilizes the talents and knowledge of school personnel and recognizes the dignity and worth of each individual member of the staff. This process recognizes the abilities and dedication of the teachers and focuses on the organization as a whole, rather than individual facets of the organization. Because of…

The goal of the seminar reported in this document was to consider the site leadership and management issue as it relates to professionals' changing roles and influences educational equity and excellence. The seminar attempted to bring sensitive reform movement issues back to those most affected by their implications. An important seminar element…

One of the most valuable skills in group decision making is the ability to make trustworthy judgments about group performance. It follows from the "inferential model" of social cognition (Pavitt, 1989; Pavitt & Hight, 1986), that there are three types of judgments relevant to the group context: (1) behavioral (what the group did);…

Background information on the history and use of quality circles is provided in this paper, along with a discussion of the applicability of this management technique to the community college setting. First, introductory material is presented on the development of the approach in the early 1950s, its widespread use in the industrial and business…

A School Context Analysis Form, designed to access the readiness of a particular school to participate in planned change, is introduced and described. This report chronicles two improvement efforts in two different schools to demonstrate how the eight identified contextual indicators interact to influence improvement efforts. The eight factors…

Three critical factors in the Terrence E. Deal model for examining organizational climate and culture are values, rites and rituals, and communication networks, and these were assessed in a study of 80 graduate students to determine their perceptions of these elements in a university graduate program in Administration and Policy Studies (APS). The…

Contrast between the appearances and the reality of several aspects of a school environment, including a participative management style, a democratic leadership style, the principal's image as democratic, and attentiveness to student needs is discussed as related to a boarding school in Israel. During an exploratory case study, observations were…

An analysis is provided of the governance system of the California community colleges based on a case study of one example of decision making. First, background information is provided on the history of the California community college system, with particular focus on state and local decision-making processes. The next sections address the…

An examination of problems inherent to class size concepts suggests possible arrangements, given limited resources, for providing optimal classroom environments. Among the problems in determining class size are ambiguous definitions, measurement problems, and contradictory research findings. Traditional definitions of class size ignore such…