The issue of freedom of speech on college and university campuses has captured the interest of the nation and attracted considerable media attention. As board members and institutional leaders address the difficult questions that arise in relation to this controversial issue, they need to balance the competing tensions between individual freedom…

Every day in America more than 50 million children go to neighborhood public schools. Parents send them off with every hope they will be safe while there. And yet, as has been the case in too many cities, violence shatters that hope. The Council of Educational Facilities Planners International (CEFPI) seeks to lead in the effort to bolster schools…

Parents expect school districts and schools to keep their children safe while they are in school. That expectation of safety and security also extends to the protection of their children's learning data. Therefore, it is critical that school districts and schools are open and transparent about their student data privacy practices, and that those…

State implementation of new standards (revising, adapting, and adopting new standards) is a significant undertaking. Such an effort at the state level requires extensive support, planning, and resources. Implementing new state standards also requires the support of multiple education leaders--governors, legislators, state departments of education,…

Charter school closure, though sometimes challenging and emotionally charged, is an essential aspect of the charter school movement. The purpose of this Issue Brief is to provide a practice-oriented resource for authorizers and other charter school stakeholders to navigate the closure process after the decision to close a school has been made. In…

Is your local authority using outcomes based accountability for planning and managing the performance of services? If yes, does it lead to an improvement? The Outcomes Based Accountability (OBA) approach uses performance management categories that distinguish between "How much did we do?", "How well did we do it?" and "Is…

Difficulties in paying for college and in maintaining good academic performance are two major hurdles to college graduation for low-income students. In recent years, state and federal budgets for postsecondary education have been cut significantly, limiting the options policymakers, education leaders, and communities have to improve rates of…

As governors move this important STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) policy agenda forward, they may find that some of their constituents have yet to be persuaded of the need for improvement. Some citizens and stakeholders may fail to grasp the strong link between high-quality STEM education and economic development in the…

Organizations seeking advocacy roles must be informed, organized, and consistent in their commitment to achieve and maintain success. The experiences of the Texas Speech Communication Association's 12-year process to become a viable force in drafting and implementing educational policy in Texas might be useful to other state educational…

This document consists of all 11 issues of this newsletter published in 1993 (November-December was a combined issue). The newsletter reports on cooperative national and international preservation activities and is written primarily for university administrators and faculty, library and archives administrators, preservation specialists and…

A "devil's advocacy" approach is proposed for the management of higher education conflict and ultimate improvement in the quality of decisions. Research supporting the value of active questioning of a preferred plan or strategy is summarized and its application is described. (DB)

Some Kansas school administrators are spending less time in meetings and accomplishing more by (1) asking if a meeting is necessary; (2) being punctual; (3) stating the focus of the meeting; (4) limiting meetings to five to seven participants; (5) providing minutes; and (6) using team-based management. (MLF)

This monograph examines college and university magazines aimed at alumni and designed to promote the institution and enhance its image. The first third contains three chapters. The first chapter reviews the evolution of these publications from their start in the late 1800s to today. The next chapter addresses questions of a magazine's role,…

Discusses nine factors to consider when attempting to determine what kind of information and how much information a superintendent should supply to a school board concerning district operations. (PGD)

The experiences of Wellesley College (Massachusetts) with developing a long-range plan for institutional survival in the 1990s illustrate the value of two strategies: devising a planning process that reflects the institutional culture, and spending time early in the process to gain broad agreement on basic financial principles and planning…