Purpose: The overall purpose of this exploratory research was to better understand rural educators' feelings about school-based sex education in order to foster better communication and collaboration between prevention researchers and rural teachers and administrators. In order to accomplish this purpose, the research question asked "How does…

Under the superintendent's guidance, the Riverside (California) Unified School District underwent decentralization between 1960 and 1978. The process involved seven stages: (1) conceptualizing and actualizing a "cooperative community" committed to educating every child, (2) communicating these concepts to key individuals, (3)…

Interviews with administrators and reviews of official reports in 12 Ontario school districts provided data on the processes and participants involved in policymaking, the size of the central office administrative staff, and the nature of changes in administrative organization over the preceding decade. (PGD)

Congress, using Public Law 94-482 entitled Education Amendments of 1976, instructed the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to develop, implement, and operate the Vocational Education Data System (VEDS). As mandated by legislation, the primary purpose of VEDS is to provide a national reporting system to generate uniform data from the…

Individual members of state legislatures wield the greatest influence in state level policy formation. This was one of the findings of a study that identified the power and influence context of state-level policymaking. Data were gathered from six states (Arizona, California, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Illinois) using an instrument…

The 1982 school board elections in the geographical and political Ottawa-Carleton (Ontario) regions gave rise to a record number of new candidates for election to the two public and two separate school boards that comprise the region. This paper examines some of the reasons for the dramatic increase and develops a profile of their characteristics.…

Four papers generated by a broader study of issues management in three suburban Chicago school districts are collected here. "Achieving Routine" focuses on the effective routinization of organizational change, in this case a curriculum decision, through the use of administrative mechanisms and the conceptual linkage of the new to…

This study of incumbent British Columbia school board members prior to election analyzes relationships between individual members' feelings of political efficacy and trust and their decisions to seek or not seek reelection. The 60 subjects, from 24 districts, represented candidates (those members seeking reelection) and retirees (members not…

Although educational leaders have been coping with declining enrollment for almost a decade, educational researchers have begun to focus on the topic only recently. The first part of this introduction to a special issue of the Peabody Journal of Education briefly summarizes the contents of the subsequent essays, which are intended to bridge the…

In contrast to the problems and policies of school boards of the 1950's and 1960's, when school enrollments increased at an unprecedented rate, the problems of school boards in the 1970's became those of retrenchment. Responding to the issues of declining enrollments and fiscal restraints, the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1981 required every…

This study of the school board agenda-setting role among 30 Minnesota superintendents interprets their perceptions in relation to environmental contexts, group demands, issues control, and district enrollment size. A microperspective of David Easton's political systems model provided the guiding conceptual framework. Respondents were interviewed…