Charter schools are publicly financed schools that are governed by teachers, parents, administrators, or others who want to create and manage an innovative public school. This document briefly defines charter schools and provides an overview of their history. It also discusses the stance toward charter schools taken by President Clinton, who…

In Victoria, Australia, every government school in the state is a self-managing school. The Victorian system of school-based management is called "Schools of the Future." This paper presents findings of a study that sought opinions of the school community toward various aspects of the Schools of the Future program and its outcomes. A…

Education in European countries has been characterized by a tendency toward decentralization and deregulation. The Dutch Ministry of Education commissioned the University of Twente to perform a comparative study of actual and future shifts in tasks, responsibilities, and authority in education in several European countries. This book presents…

In 1991, Minnesota enacted ground-breaking legislation that authorized school districts to sponsor a limited number of charter schools. Implementation of the program was politically contentious, and the issue remains highly charged. This document presents findings of a study that examined the charter schools that were proposed and operating in…

This paper briefly describes a higher education reform movement underway in Sweden and offers, respectively, the text and a summary of two policy-forming memoranda. A 1977 legislative decision on all postsecondary education gave the government authority to set education policy, and based the entire university and university college system on…

This report presents findings of an 18-month study to find out how state political and education leaders gauge the performance of citizen boards of trustees and to assess the overall condition of academic governance. The study included interviews with more than 250 state officials and education leaders, site visits to seven states, and an…

This paper presents a holistic conceptualization of the school as an autonomous system. Two major scientific paradigms, reductionism and holism, are outlined and their impacts on educational administration are discussed. Findings of a study that investigated the participation of the governing bodies of independent schools in the schools'…

Approaches to decentralization of public vocational education and training in New Zealand, New South Wales (NSW), and Victoria (Australia) were compared. The national training reform agenda and establishment of the Australian National Training Authority (ANTA) provided the national context for and influenced the direction of developments within…

This paper argues that changes in educational administration in Poland must be seen in the context of the enormous social and political changes that have occurred in that country in recent years. Centralized bureaucratic planning of social and economic programs has been discarded. The changes have impacted the system of educational administration…

A study was conducted to determine the location of authority in multi-unit two-year colleges. Inquiry forms listed 84 practices categorized as general (e.g., accreditation), business, curriculum, instruction, administrative personnel, teaching personnel, non-teaching personnel, research, services, student development services, and relationships…

The way that the participation of trustees in the processes of voluntary accreditation can help them in overseeing institutional autonomy and integrity is discussed, based on the work of a subcommittee of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. In addition, recommendations for board participation in institutional and…

Conditions and management procedures used in Dutch universities are discussed. Attention is directed to: (1) the structure of higher education in the Netherlands -- especially the University of Utrecht, its administrative procedures, and decision-making process; (2) the nature of the problems the university faced and the ineffective way in which…

Educational improvement can occur if school decisionmaking is shifted from centralized, "top down" administration to individual school control cooperatively directed by the principal, the staff, and parents. Site-based management allows the school a high degree of autonomy by placing the responsibility and authority for decisions at the school…

This audit assesses implementation of the University Operating Flexibility Act by the State University of New York (SUNY). The legislation was designed to give SUNY more autonomy to make daily operating decisions, in order that SUNY could better compete with other major higher education institutions nationwide. The legislation empowered SUNY to…

The relationship between amounts of state regulation and changes over time in faculty quality, student quality, and external funding success among public Ph.D.-granting universities was examined. Attention was also directed to the possibility that: campus flexibility has the greatest benefit for colleges that are poorly funded; or the possibility…