American public education has become increasingly centralized over the last hundred and fifty years. Everything from curricular objectives and assessment tools to teacher certification criteria (and, often, textbook decisions) are being made at the state level rather than the county, district, or school level. Increasingly, teachers are told what…

Prepared for a Strategic Education Governance learning seminar, this working paper analyses the ways in which the Dutch government tried to reach overarching goals in education, in a system characterised by a high degree of distributed autonomy of education institutions and the participation of multiple actors, and consequently a government highly…

This article, first, examines how Egyptian teachers and senior teachers (formal leaders) define leadership and whether the length of their teaching experience has an effect on their views. Second, it explores their perspectives on the relationship between teacher leadership and decision making. The research sample is a mixed group of 20 Egyptian…

Looks at how restructuring an organization affects the people in it and what this means to practicing administrators. (Editor)

Paper prepared for the CEA Short Course in Educational Leadership, Held at Banff, May, 1969.

Based on his experience in a multicampus system, the author discusses the issue of centralization, concluding that campus administrators should be given the freedom to plan, implement, allocate resources, and evaluate their programs with as little interference as possible, the central office being involved in initiation, encouragement,…

The impact of increasing federal regulation on American universities is discussed based on an informal survey of senior academic and administrative officials in 13 public and private universities. As government regulation is becoming more intensive and compliance more resource- and time-consuming, government is perceived as having little…

Reviews both the proposals and the problems inherent in the concept of decentralization. Examines the motives and methods involved in the current efforts in Trinidad and Tobago and recommends a specific course of action. Notes that these actions are driven more by political motivations than by a desire for educational quality. (MJP)

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…

Based on the realization that 20 years of educational development efforts in Latin America have had little result, this author identified problems in educational administration at the national and regional levels that are largely responsible for the lack of progress. A number of structural and legal problems were identified, including the…

Progress in realizing the full potential of computerized data processing is being hindered by costs and by the spread of a multitude of small, independent computer facilities. There is a need for some uniformity of specifications among the various systems. The result would be a compatibility that could help to reduce costs more rapidly because of…