This ERIC digest focuses on school restructuring as the central issue in the school reform movement by answering five questions: (1) What is "restructuring?" (2) What characteristics of the current educational system are the objects of reform? (3) How can restructuring attend to new skills students will need? (4) How can individual…

Because larger schools offer advantages such as a greater variety of activities, economic efficiency, and a sense of identity in the community, schools are often combined. Beyond these positive effects, however, school consolidation has some negative aspects. These liabilities include less human contact, less input from teachers in…

Local school districts have gradually lost policy-making discretion to state legislatures and bureaucracies. State-mandated reforms of school finance and academic standards (especially those involving curricular alignment with standardized tests) tend to diminish teacher autonomy and creativity, disrupt school climate, and ignore individual school…

This ERIC digest examines the slowed pace of school district reorganization since 1970 and the expanded role of state education agencies (SEAs). It also reports trends that influence consideration of various reorganization forms and considers the framework in which future policy options may take shape. The decades from 1940 to 1970 show the…

School reorganization has been used extensively as a strategy to deal with the problems of small and rural schools. However, there is no comprehensive evidence to prove that consolidation has met the problems of finance, staff, facilities, and curriculum for which it has been advocated, nor are consolidation's disadvantages and ill-effects of the…