Contrasts teacher educators' desires to change student teachers' beliefs and values with their need to foster professional autonomy. Suggests that there exists an unrecognized 'indoctrination dilemma' inherent in preservice teacher education and concludes by pointing to the need for teacher educators to re-examine their intentions. (Contains 29…

Examines the political transformation in Latvia that brought increased democratization and decentralization and resulted in changes to the educational system and teachers' professional roles and responsibilities. The paper notes difficulties encountered by teachers in assimilating reforms within their professional identity and analyzes the…

Much has been written about student accountability, teacher accountability, and school accountability. More limited research is available on administrator accountability. Recently there have been substantial initiatives undertaken world-wide to increase educational accountability. With increasing demands and changing expectations in the role of…

This article presents extracts from interviews with 14 teachers of English. It indicates some of the tensions which result for such teachers from having to prepare Year 9 students for the "national" tests in English toward the end of Key Stage 3. These are high-stakes tests: they supply the means to compile school "league…

This article develops a conceptual framework for studying how three comprehensive school reform (CSR) programs organized schools for instructional change and how the distinctive strategies they pursued affected implementation outcomes. The conceptual model views the Accelerated Schools Project as using a system of cultural control to produce…

Public school principals encounter a sizable gap between the autonomy they believe they need to be effective and the autonomy that they actually have in practice, especially when it comes to hiring, firing, and transferring teachers. That is a key finding of this report from the Fordham Institute and the American Institutes for Research, which is…

The SHAPE program, an innovative program to help teachers collaborate and support each other, was instituted at an inner-city high school in Toledo (Ohio). This study attempted to determine whether teachers in SHAPE were experiencing an improvement in their perceptions of control over educational outcomes as a result of their SHAPE participation.…

This review of the literature defines the concept of student empowerment, discusses the implications of student empowerment in educational settings, and outlines strategies for facilitating increased empowerment. A definition of "empowerment" as "bringing into a state of belief one's ability to act effectively," is offered and the critical…

This book provides a collection of papers that address issues central to university ideals: the teaching of values, the role of philosophy and literary studies in their sister disciplines (especially history), the precarious balance between research and teaching, the defense of intellectual autonomy, and the public responsibility of the…

Job satisfaction and its components were investigated among 156 teachers in 15 of the smallest school districts in the Texas panhandle. The districts were randomly selected from all panhandle districts having an average daily attendance of 200 students or less. Respondents completed a 28-item modified version of the Community Attitudes Toward…

This study examined the views held by five teachers in an adult English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) program concerning their processes of curriculum implementation in a Canadian immigrant program, focusing on how the teachers assess their own autonomy over curriculum decision-making. Data were gathered in a series of interviews, in which key themes…

This paper revisits the literature on the nature of school organizations and presents a view of secondary schools as complex social systems, as opposed to bureaucratic-rational structures. Research was conducted into three Western Australia secondary schools planning to implement school-based decision making and planning procedures. The…

Interviews were conducted with teachers who chaired the steering committees for 3 of the 25 National Education Association Mastery in Learning (MIL) Project schools with the purpose of eliciting their viewpoints on teacher empowerment and leadership. The schools (Orchards Elementary School in Lewiston, Idaho; Willow Creek Junior High in Rochester,…

The future of academic content reforms relies on the relationship between policies and the decisions of teachers. Because the agreement of teachers with district policies is congruent with teacher autonomy, the dichotomy of district control and teacher autonomy is invalid. Districts execute instructional leadership by providing teacher autonomy or…

To determine if visual excellence in television news is related to photographers' professionalism, a six-page questionnaire was mailed to 438 full-time news photographers asking them about the working conditions at their shops, their opinions about television news, and their rating of professionalism scales. For comparison, a purposive sample was…