During the past two decades, Taiwan's Ministry of Education has responded to globalization by restructuring school curricular, instructional, and decision making practices along western lines in an attempt to attain legitimacy on the world stage. As a result, Taiwanese principals, once kings within their schools, now must share power with other…

This book examines school-based management and provides strategies to implement management changes. The 14 chapters examine the components of good schools, including clarity of purpose, leadership, professionalism, lack of bureaucratic control, competition, and choice. The text describes the components of school-based management and the need for…

This collection of 12 essays examines the school's need to establish a collaborative environment as a precondition for its own development. The following chapters explore the necessary shift in schools from a bureaucratic to a professional mode: (1) "Recanting Bureaucracy: A Democratic Structure for Leadership in Schools" (D. L. Clarke and J. M.…

As school-restructuring efforts are initiated across the country, many schools are calling upon facilitators to guide the change process. Many people both inside and outside the school system can play facilitative roles. This guidebook offers tools and approaches for facilitating school change, breaking down the facilitator's role into 12…

School reform has taken many shapes over the years. Among the most pervasive of school-reform theories is school-based management (SBM), which is examined in detail in this book. The introductory chapter locates the current round of SBM in the longer cycle of educational reform, describes the extent of SBM activity over the past decade in the…

The papers in this volume, commissioned by RMC Research Corporation for the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, were adapted to reflect the input of participants at a national conference in Washington, DC in June 1992 on middle grades parent and community involvement. Part I reviews the literature in five chapters that focus on the…

Paradoxically, although major forces in society are pushing for improvement in the American educational system, many teachers experience job overload, isolation, and increasing despair. This book is the first in a trilogy designed to help teachers and principals fight for fundamentally positive changes that will benefit themselves and their…

Many school districts and schools find that they have an incomplete understanding of site-based management (SBM). This guidebook provides a systemwide approach to site-based management, using SBM as a strategy for school improvement and increased student success rather than for managing the status quo. It identifies nine essential perspectives and…

Elmore (1990) has presented two contrasting models of school restructuring, each with different views about who is empowered--teachers or parents. This book examines what happens when schools and school districts attempt to implement either of these models. Following the introduction, "Examining School Restructuring Efforts," by G.…

The American public education system seems to be resistant to curative measures. This book is a journalistic account of Cleveland Heights High School's unsuccessful struggle to achieve excellence and equity. The high school, located in a middle-class suburb of Cleveland, implemented the Model School Project in 1988 to address the persistent…

The nature and direction of educational reform and the principal's role in it are examined in this book. Information was gathered from a questionnaire that was mailed to an unspecified number of leading principals and administrators in each of the 50 states. A selected number of the initial respondents participated in a follow-up questionnaire.…

This book provides useful guidelines for implementing collaborative decision making in the public educational system. The prologue presents the historical background of educational reform in the United States and offers a rationale for radical school reform at the individual school level. The nine chapters that follow are divided into three parts.…

This book provides practical information about the complexity of school change, with an emphasis on the role of time and its impact, along with other variables, on the change process. The other interacting variables in school change include vision, history, leadership and power, the use of support and pressure, capacity building, consensual…

This work provides school change leaders with tools, techniques, tips, examples, illustrations, and stories about promoting school change. Tools provided include histograms, surveys, run charts, weighted voting, force-field analysis, decision matrices, and many others. Chapter 1, "Introduction," applies a matrix for asking questions…

Given the current social and economic changes, American education must change in order to connect students to the future. This book is comprised of a collection of essays on the topic of systemic change in education. The book focuses on reform for the future by bringing together systems theory with detailed examples of strategies and cases that…