Public school principals encounter a sizable gap between the autonomy they believe they need to be effective and the autonomy that they actually have in practice, especially when it comes to hiring, firing, and transferring teachers. That is a key finding of this report from the Fordham Institute and the American Institutes for Research, which is…

Teachers in "good" schools often provide considerable input into curriculum decisions and other types of school policies. They are considered to be "empowered." This paper argues that the apparent empowerment of teachers in these situations is actually the opposite: In good schools superordinates do not empower teachers; instead, teachers empower…

The 307 schools funded by the Ohio Venture Capital program were the focus of a study on teacher empowerment. This paper focuses on the method used to maximize survey responses, rather than on the study findings. Data were sought from the building principals and 10,544 classroom teachers to create a "total picture" of the individual…

This proceedings contains papers presented at the fourth Annual Conference of the Association of Teachers of English Grammar. Papers in the proceedings are: "Linguistics and English Language Teaching: Another Attempt" (James Kenkel and Robert Yates); "College Students' Attitudes on Grammar--A Survey" (Cornelia Paraskevas);…

This digest discusses the use of faculty mentoring programs to empower faculty and ultimately benefit the institution and improve the quality of higher education. It refers to the literature on mentoring in terms of conceptual frameworks, mentoring arenas, and roles and functions of mentors and proteges. It briefly addresses the following aspects…

This report discusses the use of faculty mentoring programs to empower faculty and ultimately benefit the institution and improve the quality of higher education. It synthesizes the literature on mentoring in terms of conceptual frameworks, mentoring arenas, and roles and functions of mentors and proteges. The first section provides a general…

Empowerment, also referred to as shared decsion making and site-based decision-making, is essential to school reform and to the preparation of students for the changing demands of a global and technological world. This paper describes the role of the principal in facilitating empowerment in the school. The principal is the building leader who…

The news on Channel One, with its impression of vague anxiety, looks and sounds like regular television news, only more so. In either case, the news is just "filler"--its real function is not journalistic but commercial, meant to lead into advertisements (ads). Mass advertising tends to assume that its audience will not be studying it…

Today's schools are being affected by changes in educational technology and increasing student diversity. In the new education paradigm, schools must prepare all students to think critically, solve problems quickly, and learn continuously. Schools therefore need leaders who can mobilize entire communities to accept and lead change. This paper…

Students must learn how to empower themselves and how to empower others if they are to survive in modern organizations (corporate, educational, and governmental). Traditional bureaucratic pedagogies, to which many faculty are accustomed, neither teach nor develop these skills. Furthermore, the use of bureaucratic pedagogies limits student…

This book discusses ways to involve students, employees, programs, and activities in school decisions. The book stresses the belief that decisions made by a group of stakeholders are more efficacious than are solitary decisions. Each of the eight chapters addresses a specific topic, and each ends with a summary and a list of exercises. Chapter 1…

In 1994, Norway implemented large-scale educational reforms that altered the face of education in that country. An overview of these changes in upper-secondary education is presented in this paper. The report describes how international competition created a sense of urgency, prompting the government to rush in with wholescale education changes.…

The apprehension and insecurity generated by the shattering of expectations of long-term work are causing many individuals to develop self-limiting beliefs and behaviors and resist taking responsibility for their own career futures. Consequently, endeavoring to facilitate a client's career decision making in one meeting has become unprofessional.…

This article constitutes an attempt to investigate how student teachers and teacher educators in the context of Swedish early childhood teacher education are invented and reinvented by practices that are inspired by feminist and post-structural thinking. I give examples of practice that explicitly make use of different aspects of the personal,…

Interview with Barbara Jackson, who has served as principal of the William Monroe Trotter Elementary School in the Roxbury section of Boston for the past 13 years and who is a strong supporter of parental choice and educational equity. The interview reveals some of her strategies for trying to empower parents. (BJV)