Describes how two Orlando, Florida, high schools enhanced student success by implementing community-generated restructuring plans. Block scheduling helped improve attendance and grade point averages. Also, a survey of teachers and students disclosed school climate gains in the areas of safety, success, involvement, commitment, interpersonal…

Whether organizational and curricular changes introduced through restructuring endure and/or result in long-term benefits for students and teachers is hard to determine. Using a longitudinal case study of a restructured high school, this paper argues that the dynamics of "institutionalization" and "renewal" drawn from earlier…

Despite the popularity of outcome-based education, research documenting its effects is rare. As an umbrella concept embracing various reform efforts, OBE defies easy definition. This article explains two OBE models (Mastery Learning and the Outcomes-Driven Developmental Model used in Johnson City, New York, Schools) and summarizes recent state OBE…

Restructuring programs and reallocating resources (to smaller classes, teacher planning, professional development, and tutors for struggling students) constitute a complex, large-scale change process. Steps include recognizing the need for change, evaluating strategies, and creating a new educational strategy for all organizational levels. (MLH)

Comprehensive school-reform models like the Accelerated Schools Project stress professional development and give educators specific, research-based strategies to address essential requirements for enhancing academic achievement. The federal Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration initiative provides necessary funding. Information sources and…

Although reports calling for middle level schooling reform first appeared in the mid-1970s, change has been slow to come. In Turning Points: Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century (1989), the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development outlined eight essential elements of middle level education. Drawing from the Carnegie Council's…

With some notable exceptions, the school critics in the first and second "waves" of restructuring have largely neglected problems of resistance in implementation of reform. The primary task of managing change is not technical, but motivational. Building commitment to innovation among those who must implement it requires a focus on readiness.…

Since 1988, considerable state and school/district energies have been devoted to implementing Re:Learning in Pennsylvania. This paper describes the experiences of Cycle I project directors who implemented Re:Learning in late 1988 or early 1989. Re:Learning is a national effort to redesign the total school system, based on Theodore Sizer's (1984)…

In 1994 the Ohio State Legislature established Venture Capital to support school restructuring. The Venture Capital school initiative is a concept borrowed from the business community in which the corporate entity provides risk capital to parts of the organization to stimulate creative ideas and to provide opportunities for local entities to try…

Findings of three studies that investigated the extent of school restructuring in American schools are presented in this paper. The data are combined from three different sources: (1) a national survey of 268 schools nominated for their successful restructuring programs; (2) a survey of 100 restructuring proposals submitted to a funding…

As Pacific educational leaders strive to make their educational systems meaningful for their own island people, lessons can be learned from the research on change. This is the second in a series of three papers on the broad phases of educational change: initiation, implementation, and institutionalization and renewal. The Concerns Based Adoption…

Written to help educators maximize student learning, this publication outlines a process for designing and implementing an improvement and restructuring plan based on knowledge acquisition, needs assessment, indepth planning, and development of commitment to change. Research has identified 14 conditions for successful schools: high attendance,…

This handbook provides information on how to use comprehensive schoolwide models to improve learning for more students. It paves the way for creating programs under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that are grounded in the lessons of successful Chapter 1 schoolwide programs. Following the executive summary and…

Provides detailed examples of the components of Title I as recently revised and suggests alternative ways that the program's new flexibility can be used to enhance school reform. Revised Title I audit procedures are also designed to promote improved program performance and increased understanding of the law. (SLD)

This special issue provides diverse data sets on a school-improvement initiative in Memphis, Tennessee. The effort seems unusually promising because of top-down district support for eight separate site-based reform designs, planners' reliance on New American Schools and other familiar designs, long-term data-collection opportunities, accessible…