Opportunities abound for educational service agencies (ESAs) to assist rural schools districts with implementing the No Child Left Behind Act. Strategies that ESAs could pursue are presented for critical issues in the areas of school-community relationships, school roles in rural development, funding, standard setting, school size, facility…

Presents the results of the Association of American Medical Colleges' Working Group on Adapting to Resource Constraints, focusing on four areas: size of the academic enterprise, organizational models and their relationships to the clinical enterprise, faculty tenure and compensation, and partnerships with capital-intensive entities. Outlines…

Intent of "A Nation at Risk" was to call attention to erosion of students' family lives, not to excoriate teachers. Reforms affecting only six hours of children's daily lives cannot succeed. Schools must reach out to help parents, and child-care workers become skilled at incidental (informal) teaching. Other concerns include technology,…

Methods that will improve student achievement include: start early; focus on reading and math; bring in trained tutors; invest in teachers; shrink the size of classes and schools; and increase the amount of time spent learning. Offers guidelines for evaluating initiatives for improving student achievement, discusses technology, and provides…

Research investigating perceptions of guns, gangs, drugs, and violence in rural schools surveyed 266 principals and counselors in rural elementary, middle, and high schools in northern Missouri. Smaller schools and elementary schools had fewer problems than larger and middle/high schools. Community collaboration is essential to solving…

A conceptual framework is offered for understanding the role of program review in college, particularly a community college. Such a framework should account for the following institutional factors: purpose of the review, stakeholder involvement, leadership support for review, organizational communication, degree of organizational centralization,…

By the spring of 2000, forty states had begun using student test scores to rate school performance. Twenty states have gone a step further and are attaching explicit monetary rewards or sanctions to a school's test performance. In this paper, the authors focus on accountability programs in which states measure the effectiveness of individual…

Based on the writings and research of Mary Anne Raywid (1994) and Gary Wehlage (1989), this study sought to identify characteristics of effective alternative high schools in Iowa. This effectiveness was identified as both student retention and graduate completion. The following characteristics were not positively related to graduate completion…

For half a century, merit pay for teachers has been intensely debated in school systems of various sizes and in virtually every state in the nation. Yet current data on the extent to which merit pay and incentives are actually used in education have not been available. To help fill this void, Educational Research Service conducted the most…

This research study investigated the leadership behaviors and organizational frames utilized by two veteran superintendents of medium sized school districts in California to address issues of academic performance in their respective districts as perceived by the superintendents and their respective board members and principals. Current…

This article examines the salary trajectory of teachers as they move up the career ladder into leadership positions. The issue of compensation is set in the context of a principal shortage that has been widely reported and discussed in the literature. Urban schools are shown to experience the principal shortage differently from rural schools.…

Most conversations about ethics and professional behavior involve case studies and hypothetical situations. This study identifies and examines the most common concerns in professional behavior as reported by 303 student affairs practitioners in the field. Differences by gender, years of experience, organizational level, institutional type, and…

The 2007 Hawai'i State Legislature passed Senate Concurrent Resolution 118 S.D.1 HD 1 Improving the Community's Understanding of the Department of Education's Programs and School Expenses Including a Comparison with Other States on Adequacy of Funds. Among the requests contained in the resolution were the following: "Be it further resolved…

Because of a need for information about the structure, staffing, physical space, and types of activities of media service departments at colleges and universities, a study was conducted to gain a snapshot of media service programs at 4-year institutions with student enrollments between 5,000 and 10,000 students in 1992 and 1993. A 47-item…

Quite often, the people responsible for spending school facility dollars have little information with which to make wise investment choices. The process is typically driven by vendors, consultants, and public opinion. The result is that the schools become a poorly performing component of the education process. This document was developed to…