The National Institute for Educational Research (NIER), Tokyo (Japan) and the Asia-Pacific Centre of Educational Innovation for Development (APEID) of the United Nations Scientific, Cultural, and Educational Organization (UNESCO) organized a regional seminar to explore issues related to secondary education in Asia and the Pacific and to formulate…

With the support of a grant from the Metropolitan Life Foundation, the Education Commission of the States (ECS) sought to broaden discussion of violence in schools and link it to efforts to restructure schools and coordinate social services. The grant enabled ECS to use the Metropolitan Life Foundation's 1993 survey of violence in the public…

In some countries there has been a general trend toward centralizing control in areas such as the development and measurement of school goals while also increasing responsibility at the school level for financial and staffing decisions and for structuring learning activities to achieve those goals. The British and New Zealand educational reforms…

The major challenges for educational reform today are assembling disparate pieces of information to create sustainable systemic change and "scaling up" systemic reform to encompass all schools, all programmatic areas, all levels of schooling and diverse social contexts. Mid-continent Regional Education Laboratory (McREL) has begun to organize its…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined leadership among staff members in a suburban Cincinnati (Ohio) junior/senior high school that was undergoing school restructuring. The research examined principal-staff communication, with a focus on the staff decision-making role. The school was participating in both the Goodlad Institute of…

This report provides the second year update to the Alberta (Canada) government's 3-year plan to restructure the province's education system. Key strategies for improving teaching are put forth, including: updating teacher preparation and certification requirements to reflect the most current understanding of effective teaching; establishing…

Equity issues in education and the conditions out of which they emerge frame the chapters of this yearbook. These chapters analyze the arenas in which our society must seek greater equity, but they do not offer a blueprint, or any singular theory or body of knowledge. The chapters are: (1) "Community Education and Education for Community" (Colin…

This book offers a step-by-step, systematic process for designing high-performance learning organizations. The process helps administrators develop proposals for redesigning school districts that are tailored to the district's environment, work system, and social system. Chapter 1 describes the characteristics of high-performing organizations, and…

This paper outlines the changes and resultant strategy alterations that took place in the legal education system of the Lao People's Democratic Republic in 1991 and how these changes affected the Vientiane School of Law. In the late 1980s, the government was transformed from a centrally-governed economy into a market economy. The difficult task…

In preparation for a 1996 restructuring at State Community College, in Illinois, from a state agency to an independent community college, a project was undertaken to develop a strategic plan to guide the transition. Specifically, the project sought to determine the necessary elements of and functions and activities required by the plan,…

In February 1994 the San Diego (California) Board of Education adopted a policy to bring about a phased reduction in class size in all district schools. Resources were allocated to initiate Phase I of this plan, which called for limited class size in grades 1 and 2 at all elementary sites to 25.5 students. A formative review was undertaken to…

In 1995, the Education Commission of the States released the first in a series of annual reports examining the progress of education reform. The report concluded that despite many encouraging signs of progress, American schools and students were losing ground. This 1996 report, the second in the series, summarizes data on student performance,…

Advocates of educational freedom disagree about whether school vouchers would liberate schools and families and lead to greater freedom of choice or trap private schools in a web of subsidy and regulation that would destroy their independence and quality. In this exchange of opinions, Joseph L. Bast and David Harmer argue that voucher plans would…

Chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at the First Missouri Symposium on Research and Educational Policy (Columbia, Missouri) March 24-26, 1994). Four chapters are revisions of presentations at this symposium. Taken with the others, they explore the relationship between education and race and ethnicity, with an emphasis on black…

The United Kingdom's approach to planned educational change is called school improvement. This book presents a new approach to school improvement based on the experiences of 30 British schools that are being monitored by the Improving the Quality of Education for All (IQEA) project. Following the foreword by Michael Fullan and the preface and…