Schools are being increasingly encouraged to "restructure" to improve education in schools. However, restructuring has many different meanings for different people. This book addresses the origins, purposes, and methods of restructuring schools and clarifies the definition of restructuring. It also advocates comprehensive change in thinking about…

In Belgium, as in many countries, there is an increasing emphasis on school self-management, accompanied by school self-evaluation. A study was conducted to analyze the interpretations of school members involved in a self-evaluation process. The tool was a structured questionnaire of 13 Likert-type scales. As a first test stage, the questionnaire…

The purpose of this study was to examine the perceptions of administrators of small rural districts hold about school-based management (SBM) and to compare them with the perceptions of administrators in larger, nonrural districts. Administrators' perceptions of what should occur in SBM were compared with what they perceived does occur. Responses…

The call to restructure schools is born from a new set of challenges facing U.S. society as well as its education system. This paper describes the process followed by 12 schools that participated in meeting the challenges in the "Schools of Tomorrow...Today" (ST/T) project, supported by the New York City Teacher Centers Consortium (TCC) of the…

Findings from a study that examined the effects of school-based management on the perceived environmental uncertainty of Texas elementary school teachers are presented in this paper. Perceived environmental uncertainty is defined as a lack of clarity and significant information in the school setting. Questionnaires were administered to teachers in…

Much has been learned during the past 2 decades about school learning environments; researchers have developed a variety of measures of perceptions of learning environment characteristics. However, most of the studies on this subject have used the whole school as the unit for the research. This study examined the relationships among school-level…

The School-Based Improvement Project (SBIP) is a cooperative venture between the Office of Community Education of the Massachusetts Department of Education and the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents (MASS). SBIP is a multiyear professional-development initiative designed to improve the leadership of superintendents who are engaged…

In 1987, Western Australia implemented a school-based management program called "Better Schools," which attempted to create "self-determining schools." Central to the restructuring effort was the establishment of school-based decision-making groups (SBDMGs), which permitted school staff and community representatives to exercise…

School-based management (SBM) is a strategy to decentralize decision-making authority to the individual school site. This document describes the principles of SBM, of which devolution of authority is the fundamental concept. Local control and shared decision-making are manifested in five educational operations: goals, budget, personnel, curriculum…

A prototype policy operation manual for the school-based decision-making councils of elementary schools in the school districts of Kentucky is presented in ths document. Guidelines are offered to help the councils adopt policies consistent with the Kentucky Education Reform Act of 1990, which are based on school improvement and extended ownership.…

Incorporating school-site management into the nation's educational systems will demand wholesale changes involving the very structure and organization of schools. Aimed at practitioners desiring to implement school-based management (SBM), this book is organized into chapters designed to enhance the sequential phases of application. Chapter 1…

This paper briefly describes the Accelerated Schools Project, presents ideas concerning an appropriate evaluation model, and conveys some early results achieved across the nation. The Accelerated Schools model attempts to restructure schools with high concentrations of students in at-risk situations so that they enter the mainstream by the end of…

An in-depth examination of restructuring is provided in this policy brief, which shows how the meaning of "restructuring" changes according to the setting and participants involved. After a review of the current context of the restructuring movement, different types of reform efforts are described, which include restructuring of…

After describing recent school reforms in Hawaii, this paper discusses the state's efforts to ensure greater accountability and to deal with two issues: student evaluation and the measurement of indicators used in state-by-state comparisons. During the past few years, Hawaii has been involved in many reform initiatives, including implementating…

School-based decision-making helps create a professional environment for principals and teachers and improves the quality of decisions. This publication provides 11 examples of school and statewide initiatives aimed at school improvement through the use of shared decision-making. The projects detailed are under way in the states of Alaska,…