Purpose: This study examines how district governance and different school contexts in Denver's portfolio management model affect shared leadership for learning. We define this as shared influence on instructional leadership and school-wide decision making, which research suggests have strong ties to student achievement and teacher commitment.…

Purpose: Effective styles of principal leadership can help address multiple issues in struggling schools, such as low student achievement and high rates of teacher attrition. Although the literature has nominated certain "idealized" leadership styles as being more or less effective, such as transformational, instructional, and shared…

Purpose: The public expects school leaders to be moral exemplars, yet prior research indicates that teachers and, more recently, school principals may score lower than other career groups on a widely used measure of moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test. Moreover, little empirical research has been conducted on educators during leadership…

Purpose: In this study the relationship between school leadership and teachers' organizational commitment is examined by taking into account a distributed leadership perspective. The relation between teachers' organizational commitment and contextual variables of teachers' perceptions of the quality and the source of the supportive and supervisory…

Previous qualitative studies show that when the formal organization of a school and patterns of informal interaction are aligned, faculty and leaders in a school are better able to coordinate instructional change. This article combines social network analysis with interview data to analyze how well the formal and informal aspects of a school's…

The increasing emergence of participation in decision making (PDM) in schools reflects the widely shared belief that flatter management and decentralized authority structures carry the potential for promoting school effectiveness. However, the literature indicates a discrepancy between the intuitive appeal of PDM and empirical evidence in respect…

Gives definition to the problem-solving process as a cycle of events. The cycle contains numerous stages at which the problem can be deflected in any number of directions depending on the various contingencies surrounding the situation. As a result, problem solving is often an unpredictable process. (Author/IRT)

Explores the implication for human service organizations when concepts drawn from organization technology, control theory, and human system design are integrated in computer simulation models that can test alternative management decisions, policies, and organization structures prior to implementation. (Author/IRT)

Improvement in education clearly depends on improved management practice, which, in turn, depends on more effective information systems. The kind of management information systems needed in education in the seventies is referred to in the literature as a "fourth generation" system, one that focuses on the decision process and is developed in terms…

Presents the "public choice" model of resource management in organizations in non-market settings. Suggests changes in the model to account for the characteristics of public school districts, especially the differences among districts in their degree of focus on organizational goals. (Author/RW)

Management information systems fail because they are based on the assumption that more facts are needed and they overtax computer systems. The alternative proposed here is much smaller (in data banks and dollars) than conventional systems and is designed to aid decision making rather than to build banks of facts. (Author/IRT)

This article examines the problem of maintaining an effective balance between the bureaucratic and professional models of school management in the context of teachers as constrained decision-makers. (TE)

Describes the current state of knowledge about human decision-making and problem-solving processes, explaining recent developments and their implications for management and management training. Rational goal-setting is the key to effective decision making and accomplishment. Bounded rationality is a realistic orientation, because the world is too…