The purpose of this guide is to help chronically struggling schools restructure. "Restructuring" means major, rapid changes that affect how a school is led and how instruction is delivered. Restructuring is essential in achieving rapid improvements in student learning. The focus is on helping education leaders choose strategies that…

For principals leading site-based structuring and improvement efforts, strategic planning is an important tool. Strategic planning melds short-term and long-term planning models and considers outside variables and school resources. Teaching staff, community members, district office personnel, and consultants all have essential roles in strategic…

Sharing decision making with teachers and parents actually increases the principal's influence. Offers 10 steps to translate leadership skills into school restructuring. (MLF)

Current school restructuring focuses too little on changes in principal appraisal procedures. The article considers the meaning of school restructuring and discusses change strategies that foster good school restructuring. A discussion of transformational leadership's role in school restructuring is presented along with guidelines for designing…

Drawing on extensive staff interviews, this publication profiles a high school principal in Eugene, Oregon, who exhibits many aspects of transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is improvement oriented and comprises three elements: (1) a collaborative, shared decision-making approach; (2) an emphasis on teacher professionalism and…

Strategies to help principals maintain the momentum of school improvement planning include: reexamining the teacher selection/induction process, ensuring constant faculty improvement, encouraging risk taking and celebrating successes, renewing the commitment to the consensus process, determining problems inhibiting achievement of goals,…

A persistent dilemma of school leadership is whether principals should concentrate efforts on building cohesion and good working relationships among staff or on specific curriculum aimed toward specific learning outcomes for students. Interviews with three principals who worked through both strengthening collegiality and improving curriculum show…

The restructuring movement is seen as the best way to reform and revitalize education. Restructuring is making individual schools the focus of change and empowering those closest to students with the responsibility and authority to effect changes responsive to student needs. This publication concentrates on teachers' and principals' roles as the…

This paper focuses on the instructional leadership role behavior of school principals in relation to the management of special education programs. A framework is presented of the principal's role in seven broad areas of instructional management: community, beliefs and experience, institutional context, principal's routine behaviors, instructional…

The article explores the consequences of new systems of shared decision making and governance for the assessment of principals, presenting case studies of two Chicago-area school districts that made substantial progress expanding teachers' professional roles in school- and district-level governance. (SM)

The nature and direction of educational reform and the principal's role in it are examined in this book. Information was gathered from a questionnaire that was mailed to an unspecified number of leading principals and administrators in each of the 50 states. A selected number of the initial respondents participated in a follow-up questionnaire.…

Developed as a guide for school leaders faced with the task of restructuring a school, this guide is a comprehensive look at the notions of restructuring and reform. It provides a comprehensive definition of restructuring, three outstanding representative examples, and a systematic process for implementing and managing change. Written to provide…

Factors that contribute to excellence in education, as well as those that have contributed to the failure of change efforts, are the subject of this document. It provides a summary of the literature on reform efforts; effective schools; new organizational perspectives derived from the business sector; organizational restructuring being tested in…

This book describes how an urban public school assumed ownership of the problems of its homeless students and their families and assumed responsibility for correcting social ills and building a better society. The B. F. Day School in Seattle (Washington) was transformed through the efforts of the principal, Carole Williams. When she took over the…

This book is a response to the need to integrate the restructuring of educational institutions and the development of a unified educational system that includes students with special needs. It begins with a discussion of paradigms for restructuring, then proceeds to an extended discussion of several issues concerning the field of special…