The E.J. Brown School is a collaborative educational undertaking between Wright State University's College of Education and Human Services and the Dayton public schools. The project's purpose is the development of a living learning laboratory based upon shared decision making and collaborative planning for urban children. Students and teachers are…

A model is presented for developing a comprehensive building plan to improve student performance. The goal-planning process provides a 3- to 5-year written plan identifying major school goals, objectives, activities, resources, evaluation criteria, and monitoring methods. The process ensures ownership of the plan by the teachers and principal of…

The School Team Facilitator assists participating New England secondary schools in planning and implementing improvement efforts based on school effectiveness research. This publication, distributed at a team training conference, begins with the conference schedule, a list of facilitators, instructions on choosing a school team, and letters to…

Based on recent school effectiveness literature, this paper suggests local policies to stimulate and facilitate school reform. After discussing the goals of the effective schools movement and briefly reviewing the literature, it presents a two-phase model for school improvement projects, based on the premise that a school's culture primarily…

The current debate on educational reform includes many proposals to increase teacher participation in decision-making in order to make school policy and management more responsive to local needs. This paper argues that policy goals for teacher involvement should be geared to helping school staff, both teachers and administrators, meet the needs of…

This report defines and describes an advanced model of school-based management in Prince William County, a suburban district considered to be part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. It documents the shift from a "top-down" to a "bottom-up" school-based management approach based on input from parents, teachers,…

Although most attempts to effect school reform have been initiated from the top down, an alternative paradigm of educational reform has emerged: the idea that educators in schools must become empowered agents in their own school improvement processes. This paper explores this new paradigm, arguing that schools are both the objects and arenas of…

Presents survey and case data from a study of knowledge use in United States schools and concludes that well-designed government-supported dissemination activities that focus on reaching schools rather than individuals may be one approach to capitalize on both internal and external pressures for school improvement. (MLF)

The aim of school councils in New South Wales (Australia) is to ensure that the whole community is involved in all important decisions made by the school. The impetus for school councils began in 1990, and in 1995 the Department of School Education placed their formation on its priority agenda in response to their slow rate of establishment. Two…

This paper reports the results of a management study of the effectiveness of middle schools in a large, urban, midwestern public school system. Results of the study illustrate the conundrum that all educational reforms are not complementary, i.e., they are at cross-purposes because they are designed to obtain different outcomes. The two reform…

In recent years there has been a substantial change in the way education is structured, managed, and financed in Australia. The move toward more self-managing schools, with school councils, school charters, school global budgets, quality assurance, and other features has been especially apparent in the state of Victoria, where the Schools of the…

This paper measures the effects on student outcomes of decentralizing educational responsibility to communities and schools. In El Salvador, community-managed schools emerged during the 1980s when public schools could not be extended to rural areas because of the country's civil war. In 1991, El Salvador's Ministry of Education decided to draw on…

Jilin is a rural province in northeastern China, known for its forests and forest products such as ginseng. In the past, Jilin's schools focused on preparing students for higher education and offered little of relevance to most rural students. In addition, the schools were understaffed and were managed by a remote, centralized bureaucracy. In…

The National Conference of State Legislatures convened a task force in 2001 to examine the role of state legislatures in addressing the shortage of qualified and interested candidates for positions in school leadership. This report contains the work of the task force over an 18-month period. The task force sorted data, research, and information…

This book contains a collection of papers from the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development's Schooling for Tomorrow project. The first part contains papers on networks and governance in schooling as follows: "Networking in Society, Organisations and Education" (Hans F. van Aalst); "Schooling for Tomorrow: Networks of…