Many school districts and states are examining parental choice as a means of improving public education. This document identifies various forms of school choice and describes existing programs across the United States. Within the public school system, choice programs fall into two basic categories--intra-district and cross-district. Intra-district…

Three Rivers Community College (TRCC) in Missouri began its self-study process in January of 1995. Within the next two and a half years, when the comprehensive evaluation visit took place, the steering committee, the coordinator, and the vice president/dean of academic affairs produced a self-study that gained continued accreditation for TRCC and…

The 1994 and 1995 School-Based Decision Making (SBDM) Surveys were conducted in the fall of each of those years for the Study of Education Policy. This report compares the 1994 and 1995 responses to three questions: (1) What do people think of the effectiveness of SBDM? (2) Who is involved in the SBDM decisions? and (3) What are councils doing?…

The idea that changes in school organization can improve teaching and enhance learning has heavily influenced educational reform over the past decade. With a goal of enabling teachers to promote students' construction of knowledge--so-called "constructivist" teaching--school restructuring has tended to focus on changing: (1) how schools group…

Many options exist for improving rural school facilities, among which are questions of school closure versus modernization or replacement. This report addresses the question of the future of the community rural school and how communities, school boards, and school executives can approach school improvement problems. It defines and examines various…

This ERIC Digest describes how experiential education can help in designing a curriculum that young people find significant. It also describes ways experiential education can help educators make the transition from a traditional program to an activity-based program. Experiential education differs from traditional education in that teachers first…

Issues raised by the devolution of decision-making to the school level in Western Australia are described in this paper. The first part provides a background of governance structures and school organization. Prior to 1980, Western Australia had the most centralized system of educational administration in Australia. The second part describes the…

This four-document collection describes the implementation processes of dramatically improved literacy programs in elementary schools which are leading the move to restructure literacy education in the Northwest (Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, and Washington). The first document in the collection, "Strategies for Improving School-Wide…

This document defines curriculum reform in Romania as the elaboration and progressive setting up of a new educational paradigm unaltered by the outlooks and consequences of the Communist era. Although the strategic and technical aspects of implementing the new reality are still at the stage of advanced working hypotheses, the essential objective…

As businesses are remodeling their workplaces into "high-performance work organizations," states must reorganize their education systems to accommodate the changing world of work and to produce citizens able to compete in the global economy. This paper is the first in a series of reports by the Investing in People (IIP) Project, which is…

This paper analyzes the relative funding model developed as part of the reorganization resulting from the 1988 Australian Government's White Paper on Higher Education Policy. This reorganization created the Unified National System which has resulted in fewer but larger higher education institutions. The relative funding model is described in terms…

Research on middle-level education and the relationship between grade-span configuration and educational outcomes is reviewed in this paper. Discussions include the evolution and growth of middle schools in the United States, differences between middle and junior high schools, and outcomes of middle-grade organization. Two national trends are…

Organizational cultures are systems of publicly and collectively accepted meanings, beliefs, values, and assumptions that a staff uses to guide its actions and interpret its surroundings. In an effort to suggest concrete ways a principal can change or maintain a culture, three important elements of a school culture are discussed: content, symbols,…

In contrast to early research (such as Coleman's) that concluded schools could not override influences of the home environment, more current research indicates that schools can make a difference. This paper summarizes those research findings (emphasizing the limitations of the research from the practitioner's perspective) and relates them to new…

The article outlines one recent attempt at remodeling a high school program at Sachem High School, in a rural suburban setting in western Suffolk County. The objective here was to develop a student-oriented educational program responsive to the needs of students while preserving the best talents of the teaching force. (Author/RK)