New Zealand and England's experience with decentralized decision making illustrates that achieving local control and accountability goals may be more elusive than initially envisioned. Additionally, there are problems with training, time management, and principals' professional/personal adjustments. Those advocating radical decentralization in…

In New Zealand the rhetoric of educational administration reform has claimed that local school management will lead to improvement in the areas of efficiency, effectiveness, and equity. In addition, the role of the school principal has been a significant site of contest and struggle. This paper presents findings of a ongoing ethnographic study…

Presents a feminist analysis of how decentralized decision-making policies are reflected at the local level in four countries: Australia, Sweden, New Zealand, and Israel. These examples indicate that management practices tend to be more modernist than postmodernist, and often have highly inequitable effects for female teachers. Contains 63…

In this national survey, local changes in primary and intermediate schools are examined in response to radical administrative restructuring of the New Zealand educational system. Recent administrative moves toward decentralization are based on the assumption that such changes will improve educational quality. The study focuses on the relationships…

Reform of New Zealand schools has been ongoing since 1988, when the Task Force to Review Education Administration recommended devolution of managerial control, within national guidelines, for each of the country's 2,700 state school boards of trustees with a majority of elected parents' representatives. Reforms instituted since 1989 across all…

This paper discusses the impact that recent educational reforms by the New Zealand government had on Maori individuals involved in community decision-making processes, focusing on one predominantly Maori rural community. Three strands of recent educational change in New Zealand are the move to self-managing institutions; ongoing debate over…

This paper examines school management and decision-making practices in four small rural New Zealand secondary schools. During the late 1980s, national legislation was enacted that established local school governance by elected boards of trustees. A national teachers' union felt that teachers and their unions had been marginalized from…