Educational reformers often partner with others to make change happen in their schools. But few reformers look to students as agents of change. In this article, the authors discuss how students are an often under-utilized, and yet crucial, educational partner. They share their student voice work in the San Diego Unified School District's high…

In many educational jurisdictions, the responses to student disengagement and behaviour problems have been restrictive or punitive; they include on-site police officers, locker searches, metal detectors, and zero tolerance policies. There is little evidence that such strategies are effective in changing behaviour, attitudes, or achievement.…

For the use of teachers and administrators involved in designing and maintaining structures that promote teacher and student engagement, two case studies using pseudonyms were prepared for classroom discussion. The first case, "Hillside High School," describes the process of reforming a traditional school. The second, "City Park Secondary School,"…

Shared governance empowers teachers to increase their autonomy and contributes to their role in determining school policy and influencing student outcomes. This paper, exploratory in nature, describes the policy impact of shared governance in nine autonomous schools where the participants at each site have provided some insight into policy issues.…

A Michigan high school abandoned its coercive school management practices for a system actively involving students in decision making. To help students feel they could make a difference, the Reaching Success through Involvement format was used to identify six workable student-involvement areas: extracurricular activities, school governance,…

The recent school reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s has been characterized by school-based management (SBM) initiatives and participatory decision-making arrangements. While much has been written about the need for teacher, parental and community involvement in school decision-making, the role of the student in these experiments has remained…

Popular demands for school restructuring are increasingly common. This book is designed for diverse audiences who are interested in school improvement. Chapter 1, "Restructuring: In Search of a Movement" (Joseph Murphy), provides a historical and conceptual framework of restructuring efforts. Chapter 2, "Feeling the Ripples, Riding…

Smyth introduces this special issue with the claim that the question of "how to pursue forms of leadership that listen to and attend to the voices of...young people" is the "most urgent issue of our times". Dana Mitra's article describes what seem to be serious and elaborate attempts to involve students in school…

Our examination of three schools demonstrates how students can be involved in school reform by giving input about problems, helping design the reform, and sharing implementation responsibilities with adult leaders. Their involvement affects both the reform--as students leave their fingerprints on it--and the students themselves, who show signs of…

Restructuring of small school districts calls for power changes, including relationships: (1) between the community and the school; (2) among teachers, administrators, and students in the school; and (3) between teachers and students in the classroom. A trip to 25 small town school districts in 21 states revealed few instances of democracy, and…

Reaching Success through Involvement (RSI) is a continuous improvement process through which schools can constantly restructure and create quality cultures through altering school roles and responsibilities of students, teachers, administrators, and parents as well as increasing student involvement. Previous papers have reported the results of the…