During May of 1985, an external audit team was engaged by the Lorain (Ohio) City Schools to assess implementation of the seven correlates of an effective school. The correlates, developed by the Ohio State Department of Education, included: (1) a sense of mission; (2) strong building leadership; (3) high expectations for all students and staff;…

This document contains summaries of 12 presentations given at a conference held in reponse to the comprehensive Oregon school improvement plan entitled "Oregon Action Plan for Excellence." The plan provides a framework for improving public schools in the areas of graduation requirements, academic expectations and assessment, teacher and…

This essay proposes a responsive research agenda to examine relationships between supervisory inquiry and practice on one hand, and teaching and learning on the other. The agenda first calls for policy-oriented research that examines the implications of state-mandated educational changes on supervisory practices and commensurate teaching and…

This report is based on data collected in a 2-year study of the implementation of Chapter 2 of the Educational Consolidation and Improvement Act of 1981, which combined the funds from 28 federal programs into a single block grant. This study investigated the effects of the act on 12 school districts, in an effort to obtain a better general…

In the wake of January 1988 takeover legislation to improve education in the State of New Jersey, this paper describes and justifies the strict state three-tier monitoring system of school district educational standards. School districts that need improvement after the first level of monitoring must develop an improvement plan to overcome their…

This compilation of tables and a brief text on the states' educational programs emphasizes demographic and fiscal background information. Public school system characteristics by state show the following: number of school districts, number enrolled, school age population estimates, percent of persons age 5-17 years in households below the poverty…

This publication is a general overview of American school boards that explains how they function and why their continued operation is crucial to sustaining participatory and representative government. It comprises five chapters that cover the following topics: (1) a general summary of the significance of school board service; (2) the roles and…

The relationship between the costs of schooling and the size of school districts is discussed. The first section of this paper provides a critical survey of what economists have written about economies of scale and questions whether bigger is really cheaper or more efficient, as is generally found in commercial endeavors. The second section…

This annual report describes some of the major activities currently under way across California to implement educational reforms. The achievements described focus on raising standards in California schools, providing technical support to school districts, and charting progress at the local level through a statewide accountability program. The…

State education agency (SEA) activities to coordinate programs for children and youth were the focus of this report. The incentives and disincentives to coordination and interagency cooperation at the state level were investigated by case studies in Pennsylvania, Colorado, California, and Washington. In particular, the study examined how federal…

A study of state education agency (SEA) activities investigated the incentives and disincentives to coordination and interagency cooperation at the state level as well as the effects of federal initiatives and recent fiscal strains on these activities. Research focused on how much coordination currently exists nationwide; case studies of…

This paper sets forth and clarifies state-level policy issues that are implicit in the recommendations for reform provided by recent major reports on the status of American education. For each report under consideration, four questions are posed: (1) Who is recommending what? (2) Does the recommendation make sense in a state's total program? (3)…

This booklet contains a series of potential educational goals for Michigan in 1985, prepared by a task force appointed by the governor. The selection of these goals was guided by three major considerations: programs likely to achieve progress within a year, projects directly affecting the classroom level, and goals with statewide effects. These…

This report presents attempts to understand more about how six background characteristics (small scale, population sparsity, district isolation within a BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Service), interaction between a change in enrollment and initial scale of the district, rapid changes in full value property wealth over time, and large…

Produced as part of the Statewide Assessment of Educational Needs (SWAN) intended to study statewide educational needs as they relate to the mission of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI), this technical report presents the methods and findings of the administrator survey. The administrator survey was done to examine the…