As charters and other autonomous schools grow to serve larger percentages of students both nationally and internationally, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how to best support and prepare leaders in this alternative setting. This study focuses on how charter school leaders perceived pre and in-service preparation and support.…

Mayoral control and accountability is one of very few major education reforms that aim at governance coherence in this nation's highly fragmented urban school systems. A primary feature of mayoral governance is that it holds the office of the mayor accountable for school performance. As an institutional redesign, mayoral governance integrates…

In this essay, the author reviews "Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation's Most Complex School System," by Jennifer A. O'Day, Catherine S. Bitter, and Louis Gomez. The book under review explores a larger set of issues, and some time has passed. But many of the issues studied remain relevant and the consistent…

The purpose of this synthesis of the literature on charter school effectiveness is to develop a research agenda on the topic and to propose action that will lead to improved performance of charter schools. To accomplish these goals, background information is first provided including: a definition of charter schools; statistics on charter schools;…

New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg and school's Chancellor Joel Klein made the creation of new schools an essential part of their Children First reform policy. In September 2002, 13 high schools opened replacing the lowest performing large high schools throughout the City. As of 2010, more than 400 new district and charter schools are in…

State-funded voluntary prekindergarten programs have grown steadily over the past decade and now enroll more than one million children. While the overall trend has been one of increasing participation in publicly funded preschool education, access in most states is limited to select groups of disadvantaged or otherwise-at-risk 4-year-olds.…

This research study was designed to build grounded theory about the challenges faced by rural superintendents. Participating rural superintendents identified five areas that presented a challenge but that also applied to superintendents in other settings: school law, finance, personnel, government mandates, and district or board policies. Further,…

This book is divided into four chapters. The first examines the concepts and issues related to understanding social systems and how the schools can be viewed as a social system. The differences between centralization and decentralization, as well as systems-analysis and management-control approaches are also explored. In the next chapter, we are…

That public education in Bedford-Stuyvesant is failing, is evident from the reading and math scores reported in this study. Approximately 78.5 percent or 45,543 Bedford-Stuyvesant children are reading below the national norm, and 80.6 percent or 46,761 Bedford-Stuyvesant children are doing math below the national norm. As the children advance from…

This report by the New York State Comptroller states that the state is currently making decisions regarding higher education based on short-term fiscal and political concerns rather than basing such decisions on long-range strategic plans founded on carefully deliberated policies. Specifically, New York has been without a comprehensive review of…

Drawing on survey data from 83 New York school districts and case studies of 6 districts, the project reported here explores several aspects of schools and districts as organizations. The conceptual framework guiding the study emphasizes that educational organizations are not governed either by their structure or by the reactions of individuals,…