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…

The author states that being a leader is more than being put "in charge" of something. It means sharing and modeling what's best for students. She describes real-world teacher leadership as participating on or heading committees or acting as department heads for some teachers. While for others, it means mentoring other teachers, asking probing…

This document describes the work of communities participating in the Public Education Network's policy initiative, which focuses on public engagement as the key element in sustainable school reform and on local education funds (LEFs) as key intermediaries in the engagement process. This document provides a snapshot of what has taken place in these…

Achievement effects as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test 9 were estimated for students in grades 1-11 that participated in America's Choice, Co-nect, Different Ways of Knowing, Success for All (SFA), and Urban Learning Centers comprehensive school reform (CSR) designs implemented in Los Angeles Unified School District between 1999 and…

Restructuring has come to mean fundamentally substantive change leading to improvement in students' education, while offering the promise of power sharing. Organizational, curricular, relational, and fiscal changes were part of the restructuring initiatives of four urban districts. Unfortunately, the efforts generally fell short of genuine…

The study examines the defining features of school improvement programs. Twelve research-based programs that have been implemented for 5 or more years in at least 50 schools or for 3,000 students were analyzed. All have achieved national visibility. Eight of the programs focused on curricular reform and topics included: (1) Core Knowledge; (2)…

As school-restructuring efforts are initiated across the country, many schools are calling upon facilitators to guide the change process. Many people both inside and outside the school system can play facilitative roles. This guidebook offers tools and approaches for facilitating school change, breaking down the facilitator's role into 12…

This study explored the social world of one school, looked at the web of relationships, and documented the social interactions that occurred in the context of a mandated reform. The study was designed to describe and understand the relationships of teachers in one school as they planned and developed a school-wide strategy for change as required…