In 1985, the Medicine Hat School District in southern Alberta, Canada, initiated the Model for Teacher Supervision and Evaluation to change school district culture and promote teachers' professional development and empowerment. The change mechanism was clinical supervision--a process allowing teachers to determine and achieve their own goals. The…

By 1993, New York City's multicultural and innovative Children of the Rainbow curriculum had been discontinued and the education chancellor fired. This article examines the curriculum's development and implementation and the controversies surrounding it. After-effects linger, as other U.S. districts address various social issues in the school…

Describes a study that evaluated implementation of curriculum materials for secondary social studies in the Netherlands. The evaluation focused on individual teachers' actual use of these materials in their classrooms. A large discrepancy emerged between the curriculum developers' original intentions and the observed instructional processes.…

A British headteacher ponders a tumultuous decade in school management. The national curriculum was one major problem. There have also been radical, deleterious changes in the ways schools are funded, governed, managed, planned, and inspected; how teachers are educated; and the terms and conditions of teacher employment. Competition for pupils has…

Project SHAPE is a two-year intervention and enrichment program for underachieving and educationally disadvantaged ninth and tenth grade students in Toledo, Ohio. Operating through teacher empowerment; curriculum development; structural organization; and student, parent, and community involvement, SHAPE's goals are developing an academically…

Explores the ethical issues involved in using standardized tests to implement a state-level policy. Examines the fourth grade science program evaluation test administered in New York State for the first time in 1989. A utilitarian view of ethics ignores the consequences of testing for different constituents, obviates caring behavior, and damages…

School reform implementations most often proceed from an ahistorical position. A study analyzing articles in three volumes of each of two education journals ("Phi Delta Kappan" and "Educational Leadership") revealed that 17 to 48 percent had no references to support assertions; few references were older than 15 years. (Contains…

Restructuring efforts, including curriculum integration, require that teachers exercise intellectual skills transcending craft wisdom and recipe exchanges. This article explores the tension between teamed middle-school teachers' technical interest in seeking recipes and their deliberationist interest in engaging in fruitful dialog. Teachers…