This report presents the conclusions and recommendations of the Indian Valley campus (California) community task force to the Marin Community College District trustees. The trustees appointed the Indian Valley campus task force in 2000 to study options for the educational vitality, fiscal sustainability, and community benefit of the campus. This…

Discusses the construction and feasibility of World Wide Web-based learning environments (WBLEs) for distance education, looking at issues in distance education and Web-based technologies, suggesting guidelines for creation of WBLEs, and presenting findings from a current research effort to illustrate the guidelines. Considers both the potential…

An analysis of increases in federal regulation of student financial aid since 1959 looks at changes in both volume and substance of the regulations, and the costs of implementing them. Federal initiatives to form partnerships with institutions in managing student aid are noted, including quality assurance efforts and innovative experiments in…

Description of the viewpoints of two experienced teachers who were implementing a novel computer program in grades five and six focuses on three main issues: learning to accommodate changes required by innovation; organizing new classroom routines; and indications of students' achievements. Curriculum content and computer literacy are also…

Factors in organizational climate and structure that enhance innovation include need to respond to emerging market trends and discomfort with the status quo. Inhibitors include negative language used regarding new ideas and lack of strategic organizational direction. As in industry, higher education can use these to involve employees in change:…

Subsequent to commentary that the most feasible locus for curricular change and instructional reform is the individual school, four models for change that implement the NCTM's Curriculum and Evaluation Standards are presented. These models are not offered as panaceas but rather as examples of efforts currently being utilized which may involve…

This case study describes why the University of Wolverhampton (England) decided to adopt the Total Quality Management approach to institutional administration, then to develop a quality assurance system to conform to an international quality standard. It chronicles two phases of program development/implementation and assesses successes and…

This qualitative study examines the perceptions of federally supported agricultural school teachers toward the attributes of two educational innovations brought by the educational reform currently undergoing in Brazil--the separation between academic and professional education and the emergence of the competency-based modular curriculum. The…

Mali, in choosing democratic education within a decentralised context, has made a clear choice as to the importance of the role that communities and territorial collectivities should play in the profound change and reform of the educational system. This reform will only happen if the communities, territorial collectivities, and all the actors…

Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are among the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa which have recently implemented policies for free primary education, motivated in part by renewed democratic accountability following the re-emergence of multi-party politics in the 1990s. However, it is not the first time that the goal of expanding primary education has been…

This article analyses change of time use and time allocation in three schools participating in a Swedish five-year national experiment in which State regulation of teaching time was weakened. Participating schools could freely decide how to use and distribute teaching time. The experiment was launched at a late stage in a 25-year decentralisation…

This document, prepared as background information for a conference arranged by the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, reviews studies on the use of the individualized education program (IEP) in the education of students with disabilities. The report begins by explaining the legislative origins of the IEP. The report then…

This paper reviews the literature on inclusion of children with emotional and behavioral disorders in regular education classrooms and proposes implementation of an inclusion program at one elementary school in Texas. The literature review covers the following aspects of inclusion: teacher selection and their expectations, professional…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the process of building staff commitment during the earliest phase of comprehensive school change, or "courtship" phase. Participant observation in a northwestern urban school district was conducted at three low-achieving elementary schools that implemented the accelerated schools model.…

Early observations of 13 culturally and linguistically diverse elementary schools, each of which is implementing one of six internally-developed school restructuring designs, are reported here. The schools are all located in one demographically diverse county, and the restructuring process occurred over a 4-year period. The study examined a range…