This paper describes early outcomes of a Sacramento, California, elementary school that participated in the Accelerated Schools Project. The school, which serves many minority and poor students, began training for the project in 1992. Accelerated Schools were designed to advance the learning rate of students through a gifted and talented approach,…

This handbook, written for educators (teachers, principals, central office administrators, university faculty, and area educational agency staff) offers guidelines on how to establish, maintain, and evaluate a practitioner-driven school network. Such a network is created and governed by practitioners who decide what services they want, modify the…

"Collaboration" appears to be a popular trend in business and education as it is discussed more and more frequently in publications. One of the problems associated with collaboration is the lack of clear definition among similar terms such as cooperation, team effort, and partnerships. This paper briefly reviews the literature related to the…

This fact sheet focuses on principles and practices of collaboration, especially between community crisis nursery and respite care services for families of children with special needs. First, the paper distinguishes among various ways to share resources, including networking, coordination, cooperation, and then collaboration, which is seen as…

Schools need effective systems for supporting teachers in meeting students' individual needs and responding to school-wide problems. The Teacher Assistance Team (TAT) model is a school-based problem-solving group that supports teachers by analyzing student, classroom, or school problems and creating alternative strategies for resolving those…

Implementing shared decision making in school-based management requires fundamental changes in traditional behavior. Initiation of restructuring systemic authority and decision-making arrangements requires changing deeply held beliefs and developing new roles and relationships. A recent survey of educational practitioners identified eight major…

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);…