"Success for All" is a compensatory education program that significantly increased the reading performance of disadvantaged primary grade students in a Baltimore (Maryland) elementary school while also reducing retentions and special education placements. The program concentrates resources in kindergarten through grade three and uses…

Current theorizing in education, as in industry, is largely devoted to explaining trial-and-error, failure-tolerant, low-reliability organizations. This article examines changing societal demands on education and argues that effective responses to those demands require new and different organizational structures. Schools must abandon industrial…

Overviews of 10 major restructuring initiatives in the United States are provided in this publication. The programs share a questioning attitude, vision-based goals, a focus on hands-on learning, an assumption of all children's learning potential, new approaches to thinking and problem-solving, and new participant roles. Each program is described…

Findings from a study to identify types of teacher involvement in school restructuring are described in this paper. A total of 203 teachers from 18 schools participating in Tennessee's Leadership in Educational Administration Development (LEAD) project in 1987-88 completed a questionnaire to compare their actual and preferred involvement in…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study, known as the Rancho Plan, begun in 1976 at a high school in California. The study was conducted to experiment with planned change in organizational and instructional structures. The data which have emerged offer teachers' recollections of what was and connect them to the long-term effects of a planned…

The Accelerated School Program is designed to improve the education of disadvantaged students by using "acceleration" techniques used with gifted and talented students. The goal is to speed up the learning of at-risk students so they will be able to perform at grade level by the end of elementary school. Central to the strategy is the…

Factors such as the need for flexible, responsive schools prompted the 1980s national dialogue about possible societal and economic changes in the role of the educational system. Those same factors set the national and Minnesota agenda for youth in the 1990s and on into the 21st Century. Changes that occur in the educational systems should achieve…

This collection of 12 essays examines the school's need to establish a collaborative environment as a precondition for its own development. The following chapters explore the necessary shift in schools from a bureaucratic to a professional mode: (1) "Recanting Bureaucracy: A Democratic Structure for Leadership in Schools" (D. L. Clarke and J. M.…

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.…

After defining administrative planning and outlining deficits and gains of the past 20 years in American schooling, this address underlines the necessity for educational restructuring. Specifically, educational leaders need to: (1) gather data determining the status quo and suggest incremental improvements; (2) address new solvable challenges and…

A strategy for revitalizing public education by stimulating the creation of new public schools is proposed in this report. The proposed system goes beyond school choice and is based on the withdrawal of local districts' exclusive franchise to own and operate public schools. The proposal is based on the premise that the state must provide both…

Ways in which schools and communities collaborate to create a learning community are described in this fifth guidebook in a series of nine video conferences on school restructuring. Extended school and community roles include enrichment of the learning environment, coordination of a learning support network, and expansion of the community of…

The first phase of a monitoring project to evaluate the implementation of the Chicago Reform Act, with a focus on the process of securing school participation in the study, is described in this report. Twelve schools out of a random stratified sample of 16 schools agreed to participate in the study, which was to consist of interviews and classroom…

Annotations of ERIC literature on the role of business in the schools are presented in this document. The following 10 items are reviewed: "What Reform Talk Does: Creating New Inequalities in Education," by Michael W. Apple; "Guidelines for Business Involvement in the Schools," by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development;…

A growing number of school districts around the country are using small school development as a central strategy for improving high schools and overhauling the way the district itself does business. Driven by an increasing sense of urgency and frustration with reforms that fail to fundamentally change the quality of instruction or the nature of…