The School Improvement Program (SIP) is a project which involves over half of California's public elementary and secondary schools and which emphasizes cooperative planning by schools and communities to improve education. The improvement planning process in each school is undertaken by a School Site Council (SCC), composed of the principal, and…

The role of the department chair as the interface between faculty and administration is considered, along with the selection, orientation, socialization, and evaluation of the chair. Attention is directed to constraints under which chairs work that are beyond their control and the way that the resulting conflict, overload, and ambiguity impede…

The three diagnostic dimensions of the Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) are tools that can evaluate the degree of new program implementation at the classroom level. Implementation success is a function of use/nonuse, appropriate/inappropriate practice, and user concerns about the innovation. These dimensions: Levels of Use (LoU) of the…

The school Assessment Survey (SAS) is a validated instrument that both assesses school conditions and provides useful feedback for staff. The SAS is organized around nine key organizational dimensions identified in the literature: (1) Goal Consensus; (2) Facilitative Leadership; (3) Centralization of Influence: Classroom Instruction; (4)…

A national project designed to examine issues of budget reform and quality improvement in higher education is described. The focus is state-level budget practices and their impact on institutions. Most of the funding for quality improvement has been categorical: a small percent of the budget is set aside to achieve particular quality or…

This paper reports on the results of a survey on inservice teacher education. Three primary groups were surveyed: teachers, professors, and parents of school children. There was unanimous agreement between the three groups that there is not enough inservice currently provided to teachers. However, there was wide variation of opinion on what the…

Describes the activities of the International Center of Pedagogical Studies at Sevres. Principal activities include the methodological perfection of French and foreign teachers of languages and other disciplines, and the dissemination of information on educational developments to international organizations. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The current research on the "characteristics of effective schools" suffers from a lack of any sound theoretical foundation. In order to establish such a foundation, researchers used the methodology of clinical analysis to determine the goals, purposes, and beliefs underlying the overt behavior patterns found in the effective school…

This report presents the results of the evaluation of a bilingual education component implemented through the Emergency School Aid Act (ESAA) in the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District. Under the program, multicultural bilingual instruction was provided in 13 schools. Twenty-two percent, as opposed to a projected 60 percent, of the students…

A study was conducted to obtain information about the attitudes of professors at a state college toward students entering college with a deficiency in one or more of the basic skills. Subjects were 492 professors who completed a sixteen-item inventory. The results of the study indicated that professors were "undecided" in attitudes toward basic…

Over the past six to eight years the Center for Occupational and Professional Assessment at the Educational Testing Service has conducted many efforts in the area of professional self-testing to identify individual strengths and weaknesses as well as to determine what professionals learn from exposure to new information. The results of these…

Participants in this resource sharing conference in Alaska, which focused on the identification of educational resources and linking users to resource providers, included representatives from business, industry, and other agencies, as well as educators. The objectives of the conference were (1) to provide providers of services with a better…

The first intensive exposure to organized dissemination at the state, regional, and national level for many of the participants, this 2-day conference consisted of a series of sessions held in Honolulu and neighboring islands. Explanations of how these dissemination efforts are organized and operated were followed by detailed information on the…

Selected by Department of Education staff to initiate a resource exchange effort, a core group of 19 representatives of educational agencies and organizations was invited to attend this conference intended to increase individual and group knowledge of the resources and services available from their organizations. A pre-conference mailing included…

Input into the design, content, and development of a comprehensive resource tool--the Montana Educational Resources and Services notebook--was provided by the 16 members of a planning team made up of Office of Public Instruction (OPI) managers and consultants, selected Montana educators, and Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Dissemination…