This handbook, based on an address given by James R. Smith, a former deputy superintendent of public instruction in the California State Department of Education, describes the elements of California's strategic approach for lasting school reform. The assertion is made that lasting, positive, and major changes in schools require that state…

Mandated team planning for a school undergoing restructuring is a major policy change with significant effects on teachers and administrators. One junior high school restructuring into a middle school served as a vehicle for studying how teachers spent their time in mandated team planning. Team planning was initiated to help smooth the transition…

For several years, San Diego public schools have been involved in a comprehensive school-community collaboration effort to restructure education. Institutional links were formed between schools, social-service agencies, and other community resources to help reduce dependency on public assistance. Three different levels of community collaboration…

This book provides an overview of the educational events and ideas that emerged in Australia during the years 1960 to 1985. It offers a comprehensive view of Australian education, covering all levels from kindergarten to university. Focusing on the remodelling of curricula and the teaching process, the book describes and assesses the…

This book presents a summary of school-choice issues, and is organized around a 1992 seminar entitled "Choice: What Role in American Education?" Each part presents a set of conference papers, followed by discussants' remarks and excerpts from audience discussion. The introduction summarizes the papers' positions and conclusions. Participants…

This handbook provides innovative ideas for enhancing a learning community for students and faculty and offers administrators a blueprint for surviving into the next decade. The book argues that we are witnessing the final phase of "smokestack education," an outmoded approach to schooling that was designed to fuel an industrial society's need for…

Research suggests that school reform initiatives have had minimal success in engendering systemic instructional improvement in schools. Within this evaluative context, this paper explores the means through which the paradigm of thinking about school instruction dominant in the profession (that is, Hirsch's "thoughtworld") potentially…

Many countries' reform efforts are government-directed programs that are driven by the government rather than by educators or bureaucrats. A comparative analysis of this type of reform, with a focus on Canada, is presented here. The paper raises questions about the international character of education reform by comparing the Canadian experience…

The international trend of shifting educational management responsibilities to the schools themselves has exerted a powerful influence on education over the past 20 years. Many reasons have been given for the emergence of the self-managing school, and an analysis of the most important reasons are examined here. The paper focuses on education in…

The educational philosophies of W. E. B. DuBois and Carter G. Woodson position them as important figures in the development of critical pedagogy. At its core, critical pedagogy is a hegemonic theory that focuses on the manifestation of power in society, with particular attention to how certain cultural groups learn to accept, engage in, or resist…

The premise of this policy paper is that two educational movements, the charter school movement and the development and dissemination of a variety of comprehensive school designs, have an unprecedented opportunity to work together to improve U.S. public education. This paper, focusing on challenges facing comprehensive school design organizations,…

School restructuring requires the critical assessment of all aspects of the educational system, including the goals of schooling; organization and management at the local, district, and state levels, curriculum; instruction; roles and responsibilities of educational personnel, students, and parents; school finance; and education regulation and…

Impressed with the vital importance of an effective public education system to the future of the Commonwealth, a group of involved business activists formed the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) in 1988. The purpose of the MBAE was to help bring about systematic improvement of Massachusetts' elementary and secondary education…

South Carolina's response to the excellence literature of the early 1980s is called the Education Improvement Act (EIA). This act increased high school graduation requirements, required basic skills testing and standardized observation of teacher candidates, and mandated extensive competency testing and remediation of students. The EIA, like most…

Presented from different perspectives, the five papers in this collection discuss three developments in education--the creation of educational environments that foster students' thinking, the use of educational technology to support student learning, and school restructuring and reform efforts. In the first paper, "Restructuring for Learning…