Although many large districts have centrally organized their Chapter 1 (Education Consolidation and Improvement Act) compensatory programs at the district and project levels, elementary school improvement efforts are strongly tied to local school autonomy and principal leadership. This paper analyzes the Tucson (Arizona) Unified School District's…

Efforts to achieve greater decentralization, deregulation, and management by objectives in the public sector have left an indelible mark on the school sector in Sweden during the 1980s. The experimental scheme of local agencies and free municipalities illustrates two such reforms. Under the free municipality experiment, a number of municipalities…

Utah's teacher career ladder program, adopted in January 1984, differs from other states' programs in its decentralized approach. Accordingly, school districts have developed widely varying incentives, allocations of responsibilities, pay scales, and teacher evaluation procedures. Various calls for career ladders culminated in 1983 with a…

The two papers in this document focus on two different major educational reforms and their continuing central issues in California's comprehensive school finance legislation of 1981. The first report, "The Waiver Process for California's Educational Code," by David R. Pacheco, examines the legislation that delegated to nonelected board…

A study of the implementation of Chapter 2 of the Education Consolidation and Improvement Act in Tennessee revealed that administrative burdens have been reduced, distributive rather than redistributive purposes have been served, availability of resources for private schools has increased, and responsible, program-oriented local control has been…

Reports findings from a questionnaire, mailed to school board leaders in all 50 states, that focused on factors inhibiting school board members' effectiveness and that identified training needs of board members. Internal board politics were identified as the biggest problem, along with state interference. (TE)

This paper discusses state control over curriculum relative to two general schools of curriculum theorists. The traditionalists employ a behavioristic social science orientation and attempt to develop curriculum theory with laws and principles tested through research. Reconceptualists reject the behavioral science model and attempt to…

Vermont's Equal Educational Opportunity Act of 1997 (Act 60) has attracted attention because of its funding and quality components, and the highly publicized responses to its implementation. A key feature is its "recapture" provision in which property-wealthy towns contribute to a state educational fund that helps support education in…

The first step in the effective reform of urban education is to address the failure of the urban communities of which they are a natural and necessary outgrowth. At the heart of the problem is the inner-city community of adults that has been decimated, leaving few who are capable of responding to the need or bringing meaning and guidance to young…

Reports on a study of the impact of attending restructured schools on the achievement and engagement of 8,845 eighth graders from public, Catholic, and independent schools. Finds modest, but consistently positive, effects on both achievement and engagement. Also finds that students attending smaller schools demonstrated more academic achievement.…

The purpose of this study was to derive an operational definition of local control and to devise a model, the Local Control Index, for classifying degrees of local control by using the education codes of eight states--Arizona, California, Illinois, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Local Control Index consists of four…

Explores some early findings from a sociological study of school governing bodies in two English local educational authorities (LEAs). Examines the extent to which sexism and racism arise during, and are reproduced by, school governing body meetings, and studies sex and race dynamics in the power relations of governing schools. (Author/AF)

This comparative study examines the functioning of Indiana school districts that are placed under control of the state school property tax review board for the purpose of emergency relief. The study sought to determine the fiscal status on selected criteria of seven such "controlled school corporations" (CSCs) for the 1985 budget year by…

A 3-year study of decentralization of Alaska schools identified several factors that influenced whether a school was locally controlled and found patterns of control associated in important ways with staff and community attitudes toward school. Information was gathered by surveys and interviews conducted in 28 communities randomly selected to…

This paper argues that courts have tended to identify and enforce individual rights at the expense, in many instances, of the ability of school boards and legislatures to carry out what they perceive to be the will of the majority of voters in their jurisdictions. The trend emphasizing individual rights began in 1954 with the Supreme Court…