Like many countries, Norway in the 1980s decentralized many government functions including public education. However, there was concern over maintaining common national education goals and evaluating schools' performance. Decentralization in schools also included school-based evaluation, evaluation done by and in the school. Three studies of…

In 1987, a school-university collaborative project, Positive Attitudes in Tennessee Schools (PATS), was established to improve school-learning environments. This paper presents findings of a study that investigated the effect of school participation in PATS on school climate. A secondary focus was to determine which school-climate variables could…

This guide is designed to enhance state policymakers' understanding of education reform networks by providing information about the kinds of networks available, how they work, and the benefits and services they offer to participants. The text is not intended as an exhaustive compendium of every network operating throughout the United States, but…

This paper summarizes activities associated with school-improvement projects in 12 Louisiana School Effectiveness and Assistance Pilot Study (SEAP) Cohort One schools during school year 1997-98 and plans for future improvement activities in 1998-99. Faculty and administrators at each school were asked to revise their current school-improvement…

A study examined ways that charter schools serve children with disabilities. This report provides the results of field-based data collection with parents, teachers, administrators, and students on how well charter schools are working with students with disabilities. It presents evidence on the reasons parents are enrolling students with…

The Southeastern Regional Vision for Education (SERVE) provides information on re-designing curriculum and instruction in schools, re-defining roles and responsibilities of school staffs, and promoting changes to address the needs of the Southeast's growing and diverse student population. SERVE offers a series of publications entitled "Hot…

The first year of school reform in Chicago was devoted to preparation for governance and the election of local school councils to serve in each school. The second year of school reform was devoted to continued preparation for governance and attempts to restructure classroom instruction. The importance of restructuring education to match how…

Following a "dear colleagues" letter from John R. McKernan, Jr., Governor of Maine and 1991-92 chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a strategy is outlined that will help educational reformers to approach restructuring from varying perspectives and improve its chances for success. Several fundamental principles underlie…

Strategies for utilizing educational corporate culture to create a quality school are presented in this paper, which argues that the understanding of the shared belief system of organizational members is crucial to the process. Creating a quality school entails moving from a "teach the process" oriented model to one that internalizes the…

This booklet summarizes findings of a study, the Effective Schools Project, which sought to promote public discussion about improving educational quality in Australia. Questionnaires that were distributed with 300,000 booklets elicited a total of 7,203 responses from principals, parents, staff, and schools. Respondents were asked to identify the…

Like the three previous editions, this book is organized into three parts: "Organizational Realities and Societal Impingements,""Leadership and Management Tasks and Functions," and "Leadership Processes." However, the book's composition and substance reflect the new demands on principals. Part 1 has four chapters…

When transferring the methods of quality management from industry to academia, there are important differences that must be considered. This paper describes the differences between traditional management and quality management, and shows how Deming's principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) can be applied to education. Some of these principles…

This monograph describes a number of successful solutions that have been used in schools involved in school improvement planning. Problem-solving strategies used by schools across the United States to address various situations are described, in which each school focused on student achievement and teaching learning for all students. The practices,…

This report, in examining higher education accountability, reviews how student assessment is used nationally and in Utah to improve higher education accountability, and reviews the methods used in Utah to monitor faculty workload. Student assessments do provide a direct method of evaluating higher education effectiveness, and Utah's institutions…

This study investigated 140 New York State public elementary and secondary schools to determine the extent to which teacher perceptions of effective schools correlates as determined by the New York State Education Department are associated with student achievement, when student background variables are used as controls. The State Education…