Nearly 70 years after one of the most important U.S. Supreme Court rulings was handed down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declaring segregated schools unconstitutional, the promise of desegregation has remained unfulfilled. However, there are still actions that can be taken to address the extant disparities in schools that exist in large…

Designed to provide managers with a basic introduction to the planning components and procedures involved in planning for library automation, the overview provided here offers guidelines for eight documents that may be produced as part of such a study: (1) Automation Project Long Range Plan (60 Month Plan), an executive summary document providing…

With the goal of providing professional development resources for enhancing faculty research productivity, Washburn University (Kansas), which employs about 250 full-time faculty, developed a program that allocates institutional funds through a peer review process. The fund's peer review process has involved two committees, a Faculty Research…

This manual describes a systematic process for conducting an educational needs assessment at the building level which includes suggestions for the formation of an advisory group and the use of two Likert Scale surveys. The advisory group is composed of parents, students, and educators; this group carries out the tasks of understanding, planning,…

A school district's governing board, superintendent, and business manager should work as an effective fiscal policy team with good communication. This self-assessment guide is designed to assist in the overall evaluation of fiscal policy team communication. Four sections (budget development, budget monitoring, financial reporting, and…

The charge of the Committee on Strategies for Excellence was to examine the current status of elementary and secondary education in Iowa, and to investigate ways in which school districts could be educationally more productive. The report brings together recommendations from various state and national reports, reviews the literature, and makes…

This paper reports on the implementation of an Integrated Assessment and Strategic Planning (IASP) process to comply with accountability requirements at the community college of New Mexico State University at Alamogordo. The IASP model adapted an existing compliance matrix and applied it to the business college program in 1995 to assess and…

This book offers college department chairs guidelines for effectively fulfilling their roles as faculty developers, managers, leaders, and scholars. The results of several national surveys on chairs' duties and needs are summarized. Part 1 reviews the role of faculty developer. A practical set of procedures is given for recruiting faculty, bearing…

This report presents the results of a study of the condition of higher education facilities in the United States and offers recommendations to improve the deteriorating state of such facilities. The 1995 survey examined statistical, financial, and operational data gathered through mailed questionnaires returned by 400 institutions. The results…

Designed to assist individual two-year institutions in analyzing their financial performance in relation to regional and statewide norms, this report presents comparative financial statistics for the 1989-90 fiscal year derived from a sample of 531 public community and junior colleges. The three main sections of the report present, respectively,…

The past and current status of the student activity fee is reviewed from the perspectives of the legislature, state agency or state board of control, case law, and institutional trends. The analysis is based upon four national studies, a review of case law, and a campus model for the administration of student activity fees. Various states have…

This technical manual describes the School Assessment Survey (SAS), a multidimensional questionnaire that uses teachers' perceptions to measure key organizational characteristics of a school. Developed to take advantage of recent developments in organizational theory and school effectiveness research, the SAS instrument can be used to identify…

A research study of the implementation of "good ideas" in 14 schools came to the conclusion that differences in school organization and climate cause differences in the success of school improvement. Specific aspects of organization and climate in these schools, called factors of school context, are the following: resources, incentives,…