School/Community-Based Management (SCBM) improves the quality of education by providing schools with administrative flexibility and by empowering each school's community to make and implement decisions that will directly affect its members and students. To help individual school communities that are considering adopting SCBM understand how shared…

The Chicago Public Schools have experienced major reforms since the late 1980s. This has resulted in increased power to local school communities and the creation of local school councils (LSCs) that employ its principals. This paper presents findings of a study that examined principals' perceptions of their changing roles under Chicago's school…

The implementation of educational reform in Chicago is discussed. Reform was initiated in Chicago to improve education for all children. A new governance structure is being created for the schools, based on the premise that schools should be under the firm direction of parents and that authority should be vested in the school community, rather…

In 1989, Chicago (Illinois) Public Schools began an experiment with the radical decentralization of power and authority. This book tells the story of what happened in Chicago's elementary schools in the first four years of this reform. Implicit in the reform was the theory that expanded local democratic participation would stimulate organizational…

Since 1993, school reform leaders from Chicago (Illinois), Denver (Colorado), New York (New York), Seattle (Washington), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania) have come together in the Cross City Campaign to work for the improvement of urban education. In each of these cities rhetorical pleas for decentralization and the investment of decision making in…

This book is an introduction and guide to school-based management, a decentralized form of organization in which decisions that have traditionally been made by a superintendent or school board are made by the local school. Chapter 1 provides an overview of decision-making in public school systems starting with a brief history of the trend toward…

This study finds that the New York City version of school-based decision making, School-Based Management/Shared Decision Making (SBM/SDM), fails to bring school-based management or shared decision making to the schools. This report begins by describing the seriously dysfunctional structure of the New York City public schools and explains the…

This paper measures the effects on student outcomes of decentralizing educational responsibility to communities and schools. In El Salvador, community-managed schools emerged during the 1980s when public schools could not be extended to rural areas because of the country's civil war. In 1991, El Salvador's Ministry of Education decided to draw on…

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…

A review of the literature on school reform and successful restructuring efforts, with a focus on the decentralization of the Chicago public school system, is the purpose of this paper. Under new legislation, the Chicago Board of Education will be disbanded to encourage citizen control of schools, and will be replaced by a system of individual…

This publication contains two papers on the implications of school decentralization for teacher education, student achievement, and democracy. The first paper, "Devolution in Education Systems: Implications for Teacher Professional Development and Pupil Performance" (Geoff Whitty), explores the way education reform movements for…

A historical overview and analysis of the decentralization process in Victoria, Australia, is the purpose of this paper. The case study illustrates the impact of conflict between political and administrative agendas on attempts to implement the government-initiated policy decision. The current two-tiered system is composed of central and local…

This report is an overview of a conference on the reform of urban schools, focusing on the Chicago (Illinois) public schools. Panel discussions included the following: (1) "Parents' Role/Parental Involvement"; (2) "School-Based Management"; (3) "The Principal's Roles and Responsibilities"; (4) "Teacher…