An important objective of many educational institutions is to prepare students for work. School officials need a "good" measure to know how effectively and efficiently their programs are meeting this objective. Three commonly used measures of measuring a school's performance are placement rates, the proportion of graduates in education-related…

This chapter evaluates Florida legislation establishing school advisory committees and is intended to improve understanding of both the potential and the problems of school advisory committees. It begins by examining advisory committees across the nation. It then turns to an analysis of school advisory committees in Florida. The report on…

This collection of papers delivered at a conference on accountability held at Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education in Australia examines the meaning of accountability in education for teachers, lecturers, government, parents, administrators, education authorities, and the society at large. In Part 1, W. G. Walker attempts to answer the…

Public demands for accountability in school systems led the Capital School District in Dover, Delaware, to begin investigating management systems in 1974. This investigation led to the adoption of a management by objectives system in 1975 and the addition of program budgeting in 1976, providing the district with the tools of administrative…

This paper examines practices under school control that have an impact on the allocation and expenditure of instructional time, and offers research based considerations for effective program implementation. Research literature sources and data sets are used as a basis for examining: pacing of instruction, uses of common textbook instruction,…

Arguments in support of standardized testing are critically analyzed. Usual criticisms of such tests are summarized as relatively unimportant. However, two basic criticisms are offered: the competitive nature of scoring standardized tests and their lack of content validity. The test-makers contention that tests are neutral and simply need to be…

Community colleges, in order to maintain a credible place within higher education during the 1980's, will have to integrate arts and sciences instruction into a curriculum provided for an increasing percentage of non-transfer students. This increase, due to an expected intensification of the competition from universities for a shrinking pool of…

In a speech to the House of Representatives, the president of the Association of American Law Schools describes the intrusions upon faculty governance of law schools by deans, university administrators, lawyer alumni, law students, and the judiciary. It is suggested that law schools have never been better, yet legal education has never been under…

This monograph contains eleven exemplary articles that focus on topics related to competency-based adult education. Among the articles included are (1) Competency Based Education: Is It Applicable to Adult Education Programs?, by James E. Hertling; (2) What Adult Performance Level Is--and Is Not, by William G. Spady; (3) Competency Based…

Methods for analyzing faculty workload, workload issues related to collective bargaining and new federal reporting requirements, and faculty and institutional perspectives about faculty workload are considered. Workload studies are valuable to state legislators concerned with budgets, enrollment trends, and efficient institutional operations.…

At present, there are at least 13 major federal laws and at least 439 separate statutory authorities regulating various aspects of college and university behavior. In addition, various state coordinating and governing boards are making increasing demands for data from the campuses and are ordering colleges to drop high cost and/or low enrollment…

This interim report presents the background, procedures, and preliminary results of a national survey of Head Start directors and teachers, focusing on the extent of use of developmental assessment procedures and instruments, staff perceptions of their usefulness and of unmet needs, and the relationship of selected variables to the use of…

Three issues of quality in higher education are addressed: defining quality in public higher education, obstacles to the accomplishment of quality, and how to sell the need for quality in public higher education to the government and others. It is suggested that varied standards of student and faculty performance are needed among types of…

Trends and changing conditions likely to affect state higher education boards and their functions, and responses to the changes are the focus of this paper. Three underlying factors are identified--that all changes will not affect all states in the same way, that no two state boards are exactly alike, and that many of the more recently established…

Recent legislation and court decisions have upheld the right of every child to a quality education. Public Law 94-142, The Education for All Handicapped Children Act, requires that all states provide an appropriate education for all handicapped children. Given that special education is a civil right, it is inevitable that educational malpractice…