Gives a brief historical background of education in England and describes the effects of the Education Reform Act of 1988 to undermine the powers of local education authorities. Cites open enrollment, local management of schools, grant-maintained schools and city technology schools, teacher performance appraisals, and the national curriculum as…

Considers issues of school choice and school autonomy. Parents, society as a whole, and the educator team of each school should have a lead role in answering the basic questions about schooling. Examples from schools in other countries illustrate some new approaches to school autonomy. (SLD)

Describes the struggles and triumphs of a Maori community in the Bay of Islands (New Zealand) as it took local control of its rural school and made it fully bilingual. A series of government reforms have made the Maori people responsible for administering the school with insufficient funds while the government maintains power over the curriculum…

In the fall of 2006, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the Unified Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) that called for a third-party research firm to analyze resource use across the Los Angeles school system. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) was chosen to conduct this analysis. The study was…

This paper presents a framework for understanding and facilitating teacher self learning in the school organization at the individual and group levels. It focuses on how individual teachers and their groups acquire self learning and self renewal while managing their work. The paper also discusses implications of the framework for teacher…

This publication introduces school personnel concerned with early intervention with potential school dropouts to a promising school-based interprofessional case management model that has been successfully field-tested in 25 very different elementary school communities of Idaho and Washington State over the past 7 years: C-STARS (Center for the…

This executive summary presents evaluation findings and conclusions from a 4-year study of a demonstration project focusing on a school-based and school-linked interprofessional case management approach to dropout prevention. The project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, was administered by the Center for the Study and Teaching of…

This document consists of the first five issues of "Notes from the Field," a serial documenting a 5-year study of the implementation of the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) of 1990 in four rural Kentucky school districts. The first issue provides a brief overview of KERA policies and the status of their implementation in the study…

This report highlights recent legislation in Minnesota and California concerning charter schools, schools designed and run by teachers under contract with a public sponsor, and provides a brief overview of the issues involved in the establishment of charter schools as a strategy for improving public schools. In Minnesota, charter school…

Written under the joint auspices of the Educational Excellence Network of Vanderbilt University (Tennessee) and the National Conference of State Legislatures, this book contains nine chapters, by leading educators, divided into five sections that explore the major issues in education reform. Following a foreword by John Martin and an introduction…

This bibliography provides a recommended list of research and theoretical literature in school restructuring. The literature, chosen to be of interest for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers, is organized into five areas: (1) General References on School Restructuring is divided into proposals for school reform, how schools work, and the…

Factors that contribute to excellence in education, as well as those that have contributed to the failure of change efforts, are the subject of this document. It provides a summary of the literature on reform efforts; effective schools; new organizational perspectives derived from the business sector; organizational restructuring being tested in…

Reforms in education have raised two critical fiscal policy issues: How is education reform to be financed? and Do the dollars spent on education reform make a difference? Schools can successfully meet these challenges by practicing sound fiscal management and placing an emphasis on cost-effectiveness and accountability. In the future, a…

Nine conference papers examine educational administration in Canada and England. Three papers present the results of survey research on rural principals' reactions to decentralized budgeting in Saskatchewan (Canada), the impact of local government reforms on local educational services in England, and the effects of principals' leadership styles on…

Most studies of the early implementation of Chicago (Illinois) school reform have focused on the creation and early functioning of the Local School Councils (LSCs). This study is concerned with understanding the resources that different school communities have to embrace the LSC reform, the time frame needed to promote educational change, and the…