Quality improvement, or Total Quality Management (TQM), has been used for years in the corporate world to help companies achieve better customer satisfaction, increase market share, and improve profitability. More recently, TQM has emerged as a promising strategy for school improvement and educational reform. In 1991, the school district of…

Paradoxically, although major forces in society are pushing for improvement in the American educational system, many teachers experience job overload, isolation, and increasing despair. This book is the first in a trilogy designed to help teachers and principals fight for fundamentally positive changes that will benefit themselves and their…

Since the 1980s, shared decision making (SDM) has become a significant part of school-reform efforts. Advocates say that SDM will improve student learning, create teacher satisfaction, and develop new forms of leadership. This digest presents an overview of research that investigated whether SDM delivers on these promises. Studies indicate that so…

Shifting from traditional, hierarchical bureaucracies to participatory governance and decision making is a major theme in school restructuring. This paper focuses on the involvement of teachers in key aspects of school decision making. Specifically, the paper describes how changes in power relations supported teachers' focus on improving the…

This paper describes a reality-based learning project in which sophomore accounting and engineering students collaborated in interdisciplinary teams to design and build a million-dollar waterslide park. Two weeks into the project, the teams received a briefing from an industrial panel of engineers, bankers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals.…

The 1990 Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) provided, among other measures, a new governance body for schools called "School Councils." These school-based, decision-making councils are composed of parents and teachers and headed by principals. This paper presents findings of a study that explored the effects of KERA's provision for…

Experience shows that teamwork produces powerful results. Working in a team environment, however, presents its own set of challenges. This handbook provides U.S. Department of Education managers and employees with guidance to develop high-performing teams. Based on input from agency employees throughout the country, the handbook was designed to…

This report describes the development and implementation of an integrated team approach for interviewing candidates for employment with a residential program that serves children (ages 10-18) with emotional disturbances and behavior disorders. The integrated interview approach was accomplished by: (1) training the supervisors to increase their…

Principals encourage student academic gain by the ways in which they govern the school, build strong collaborative relationships, and organize and allocate professional work time. Because these activities are important predictors of academic achievement, along with quality teacher activities, further information is also provided about how…

Some evidence from the school-restructuring literature indicates that traditional school leadership behaviors and school-based management (SBM) are incongruent. Collaborative relationships between teachers and school leaders are problematic when teachers' duties and performance appraisals are hierarchically decided by school leaders. This paper…

This publication examines the situations in which school-based management has worked and, conversely, those in which it failed to meet expectations. It attempts to identify exactly what school-based management (SBM) is and what it is not. Information was obtained from interviews with researchers and practitioners, a review of literature, and a…

This book presents interactive problem-solving situations based on the principles of Total Quality Management. Following the introductory chapter, the second chapter describes the two stages of the problem-solving process: (1) analysis of the problem and its causes, and (2) identification of a solution. Each stage is comprised of three…

This manual is designed as a resource for involving learners in literacy programs. Although the report is written at a high reading level, highlights for each section that are written in clear language are found at the beginning of the manual. Section 1 introduces the topic of learner involvement; it also describes the benefits of learner…

This document presents findings of a study that tracked the development of a shared decision-making project in a Florida county school system since its inception in 1989. The impetus for the Shared Decision-Making Project came not from school stakeholders, but from the interplay of national reports, regional problems, state legislation, and local…

An indepth analysis of critical issues in school restructuring is provided in this first of a series of reports. The first article, by Karen Prager describes selected aspects of school restructuring in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, elementary school and illustrates how school-based management can articulate school vision and support teacher cooperation.…