This paper intends to describe the recent experience of a small, rural, two-year technical college. After four decades of success, the college had found itself in a difficult situation with a substantial loss in enrollment and diminished state and local support, coupled with low campus employee morale. In response, the college team closed ranks…

William Lowe Boyd's extraordinarily wide scope of intellectual interests is well represented in a rich mix of publications and presentations during his career. His work ranges from analyses of choice in education to matters of productivity, children's services, comparative school reform, educational leadership, school-community relations,…

In their search for magic bullets to fix failing schools, policymakers seldom directly address powerful ecological factors impacting schooling. This article identifies several major demographic, societal, economic, and educational changes and trends in U.S. society over the past several years; analyzes their impact on schoolchildren; and offers a…

Finland has, as of late, become an inspiration for American school reform. There is no denying that we have much to learn from the Finnish system and it rightly deserves its global accolades. However, over the course of the following pages, I would like to suggest that it is also lucrative to look north of the 49th parallel and consider the…

The next phase of high school reform is ripe with possibilities. Over the last 3 decades, educational research has identified a number of promising and effective high school models. Research demonstrates the benefits of career academies and early college schools. Schools that offer small, personalized environments; comprehensive approaches to…

This study describes the status of small school reforms in U.S. high schools and contemplates their future. It asks how cultural and instructional reforms differ across school reform types. Analyses focus on indicators of teacher and student culture as well as instructional reforms including project-based learning (PBL) and other inquiry-related…

Schools created as part of the small schools movement have been in operation for almost a decade, allowing identification of patterns in their growth. This study examines 4 years of survey data on 12 start-up and 13 conversion small high schools. Start-up small schools, almost all of which began with one grade level and grew by one grade per year,…

Educational privatization is rapidly expanding in many urban school districts, altering the social, political, and economic dynamics of educational policy and leadership. Yet many adherents cast privatization primarily as a fiscal or economic alternative to traditional public school management, ignoring these broader alterations. Drawing from a…

In the United States, considerable financial and human resources have been devoted to breaking some large high schools into smaller learning communities (SLCs). This article reviews research that compares SLCs to comprehensive high schools on a variety of measures. Extant research neither supports nor refutes the promise of SLCs to improve…

This article presents a conceptual framework derived from institutional theory in sociology that offers two competing policy contexts in which charter schools operate--a bureaucratic frame versus a decentralized frame. An analysis of evolving charter school types based on three underlying theories of action is considered. As charter school leaders…

This article analyzes how macrolevel institutional forces persist and limit the expansion of decentralized schools that attempt to challenge normative definitions and practices of traditional school organizations. Using qualitative case study methodology, the analysis focuses on how one decentralized charter school navigated and reconciled its…

This case study of the leadership of Paul Vallas as CEO of the Philadelphia city schools from 2002-2007 demonstrates that No Child Left Behind has enhanced the formal authority of big city district chiefs even though they are constrained by its accountability mandates and by the pressures from a growing number of influential stakeholder groups. In…

This article critically reviews two bodies of literature that potentially share common concerns, yet rarely overlap: distributed leadership and educational micropolitics. Alternative explanations for the split between these two analytical approaches to school organization are explored in sections on problem framing, methodology, and the…

University-based leadership preparation programs no longer enjoy a near monopoly on the right to prepare school principals and other administrative leaders, and now compete with a growing number of alternative providers. This article utilizes the new institutionalism literature to analyze this shift. Practitioners and policymakers demanded reforms…

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…