School-based management, or local school control, is an organizational school reform effort aimed at decentralizing school decision-making that has become prevalent in districts throughout the United States. Using the groundbreaking Chicago system of local school control as an exemplar, this article outlines the implications of such reform efforts…

When policymakers begin to think of ways to help schools improve, they often settle on the idea of giving individual schools greater independence. This led to the "site-based management" movement of the 1990s. Today, granting schools autonomy from some or all rules remains a popular strategy for reform. With expanded autonomy, districts…

This quantitative analysis of existing data explored the effect of school level autonomy on teacher perceptions of influence, improvement of instruction, shared leadership, and professional development using data from a biannual survey of Chicago elementary level public school teachers to answer the following questions: Is there a difference…

New small autonomous schools initiatives are relatively recent educational change strategies that in some urban districts aim to remake how district central offices function as institutions. In this article, the author draws on theories of organizational innovation and learning to reveal how central office administrators participate in these…

School reformers hope that converting comprehensive high schools into collections of small schools will produce results similar to those realized in freestanding small schools. Three themes--personalization, professional community, and shared decision making--exemplify the early successes in conversions. But the challenge of sustaining these gains…

The primary objective of this qualitative study is to explore the impact of autonomy on the relationship between schools and districts of the school level across governance, operations, curriculum and instruction and the decision making that accompanies the each of these factors. More specifically, this study focuses the impact of autonomy within…

Educators from the United States flock to Edmonton, Alberta, a district in Canada where schools control 80% of the district's total budget. Education leaders from Chicago, Colorado, Hawaii, Los Angeles, Minnesota, Oakland, California, and the District of Columbia have all flocked to learn about Edmonton's experience with site-based management of…

This article builds and explores the hypothesis that parent and community participation in school governance can have positive impacts on community development by fostering improvements in school performance and school-community relations and by acting as a catalyst for collective action around community-development issues. It does so through case…

Describes an Illinois elementary principal's efforts to work with teachers to reshape her school's culture, curriculum, and organization into a model stressing collegiality and greater teacher involvement. A staff development calendar and action plan are presented to illustrate the patchwork quilting analogy. (four references) (MLH)

School performance measures developed by a public management institute have improved learning, confidence, cost effectiveness, teamwork, and accountability among students and teachers in Illinois districts. A model measures learning, parent and teacher satisfaction, and cost. Zion, Lake Forest, and North Chicago districts made substantial gains…

To ease the transition to participative decision making, some site-based-managed schools are turning to technologies such as computers, spreadsheets, word processing, e-mail, voice mail, databases, and the Internet. Although few schools recognize available technological options and their ability to improve accountability, some administrators in…

Decentralization has been a popular theme in school districts for a long time. Indeed, most districts claim that they are decentralized, having latched onto the "site-based management" movement of the 1980s. Superintendents and central-office personnel point to their local school councils, staffed by parents, teachers, and school…

A study conducted in an Illinois metropolitan school district explored four dimensions of school-based management implementation: school leadership, school climate, student achievement, and community involvement. Survey data from 176 teachers, 42 parents, and 6 administrators revealed that length of program involvement positively influenced…

Summaries of four papers and a discussion presented at a symposium on expanding the research base of systems of care for children's mental health examine school-wide systems of positive behavioral support and provide data on a three-tiered Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS) program for improving mental health functioning of…

The article explores the consequences of new systems of shared decision making and governance for the assessment of principals, presenting case studies of two Chicago-area school districts that made substantial progress expanding teachers' professional roles in school- and district-level governance. (SM)