Evaluation frames offer a practical, adaptable site-based staff development approach that serves as a vehicle for clarifying needs and planning. Evaluation frames within staff development empower teachers to define and design innovations around their unique experiences. The paper describes the method and presents a sample staff development…

Discusses the benefits and effects of music teacher empowerment. Concludes that additional skills, knowledge, and professionalism will be necessary to successfully teach music in an empowered setting without losing sight of the students' larger interests. Urges that music education programs for training teachers be expanded to include critical…

Examines school district practices which affect student performance. Rather than central offices making decisions for individual schools, districts should provide a framework within which teachers and principals can participate in decision making. The article discusses central office role in leadership, curriculum, personnel, budget, faculty…

Describes how one middle school implemented shared decision making successfully. Presents questions that staff asked themselves, including how stakeholders' interests are represented, the type of communication network to use, changes in teachers' and principal's roles, keeping the focus on student learning, the type of staff developments needed,…

In this monograph the author offers the reader a new perspective on an important, dynamic, and sometimes daunting issue: managing successful school-based leadership. Organized around the seven elements of art criticism, the author uses an arts-based approach to weave together notions of research-based leadership skills for successful school-based…

Every educational change occurs with an equal and opposite reaction to that change. Some changes and their opposing reactions which illustrate this point are: (1) team teaching versus the negative dynamics of group planning; (2) justifications for funding special education versus emphasis on average and gifted students; (3) school site management…

Within the past decade, the British government imposed a national curriculum, embraced open enrollment, and shifted decision-making authority away from the district offices to the schools themselves. This report describes England's scheme of local management and gauges its impact on various aspects of the education service. It also examines…

IMPACT II is a nationwide educational nonprofit organization that supports innovative teachers who exemplify professionalism, independence, and creativity within the public school systems. The model has been adopted in many areas, including New York (New York). This catalog contains profiles of 33 projects that represent innovative…

Project Creating a New Approach to Learning (CANAL) was funded by monies granted under the Settlement Agreement between the United States and the Chicago (Illinois) Board of Education to relieve the effects of segregation in racially identifiable Black and Hispanic American schools. Using a school-based management system, principals, teachers,…

This dissertation is a qualitative study that explores how three teams of humanities teachers at Capital High School (Charleston, West Virginia) tried to create and sustain an environment in which they could make decisions over curriculum, pedagogy, and school self-governance. The study also examines what empowerment means to the teachers in a…

This paper describes a partnership developed between the Baltimore County Public Schools and Johns Hopkins University. The purpose of the partnership was to train teachers to become school-based leaders in technology through a 36-credit graduate program in Technology for Educators. The paper is divided into the following sections: (1) the partner…

This analysis of the Boston (Massachusetts) Public School System considers ways of advancing the opportunity for parent choice of school and program, and ways of breaking the bureaucratic culture of big-city American public schools to introduce a culture promoting innovation and experiment. The Boston public schools system, like large urban…

Collaborations between schools and parents, and schools and other institutions, seek to improve or expand available resources. This issue of "Focus in Change" focuses on two elementary schools with different models of collaboration in place. At Columbia Park Elementary School (Maryland) parents have been involved in site-based management teams…

This booklet addresses current research on the needs of gifted students and the relationship of these needs to the philosophy and intent of some of the major trends in educational reform and restructuring. Eight major reform trends are examined in terms of definitions, philosophy, key elements of the literature, examples of practical applications,…

This report describes the Comprehensive Local School approach to school restructuring, which envisions the school as the coordinating vehicle for all children's services, including health and social services, and which reconfigures and coordinates all categorical programs at the school site under a site-based management system characterized by a…