This paper describes early outcomes of a Sacramento, California, elementary school that participated in the Accelerated Schools Project. The school, which serves many minority and poor students, began training for the project in 1992. Accelerated Schools were designed to advance the learning rate of students through a gifted and talented approach,…

Evaluations of school restructuring, particularly school-based management (SBM) and shared decision making (SDM), have tended to focus on problems of implementation and on its consequent failure to fulfill its promises. Inadequate resources, unclear responsibilities, inhibiting regulations, and institutional resistance have all been cited as…

The 1994 and 1995 School-Based Decision Making (SBDM) Surveys were conducted in the fall of each of those years for the Study of Education Policy. This report compares the 1994 and 1995 responses to three questions: (1) What do people think of the effectiveness of SBDM? (2) Who is involved in the SBDM decisions? and (3) What are councils doing?…

The restructuring movement is seen as the best way to reform and revitalize education. Restructuring is making individual schools the focus of change and empowering those closest to students with the responsibility and authority to effect changes responsive to student needs. This publication concentrates on teachers' and principals' roles as the…

For over a decade, University of Florida researchers worked with middle schools in a large urban and suburban south Florida district, as they developed and then worked to sustain inclusive reform. One middle school, Socrates, was notably successful, having built its inclusion model on a foundation of previous reform and a school culture…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the efforts of one Dade County, Florida, high school to use site-based management/shared decision making (SBM/SDM) over a 7-year period. The study examined participants' beliefs about the distribution of authority, the nature of work, and conceptions of learning and compared those beliefs with…

Research suggests that school reform initiatives have had minimal success in engendering systemic instructional improvement in schools. Within this evaluative context, this paper explores the means through which the paradigm of thinking about school instruction dominant in the profession (that is, Hirsch's "thoughtworld") potentially…

This issue of CPRE Policy Briefs looks at findings from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's (CPRE) study of how central office and school staff in three urban districts made decisions about instructional improvement strategies, and how much weight they gave to evidence. The three districts, in three different states, had enrollments…

This research summary says school-based management increases political activity in schools, but is time-consuming; many teachers evade SBM; less actively participating parents risk co-option by educators; and schools will not commit necessary resources. Academic achievement is not necessarily improved, and organizational implementation obstacles…