Legislated change in rural schools districts may be slow and painful. This paper describes the ambience of a rural Texas K-12 school through the eyes of a new science teacher with northern and urban education experience and through the observations of an outside researcher. Attitudes that learning is not important, that hard subjects need not be…

Data on 70 independent school districts within the East Texas School Study Council were studied to develop a model, based on dissatisfaction theory, that would predict a target election of a school board member. It was hypothesized that: (1) standard variables from the dissatisfaction theory would account for a significant amount of the variance…

As Texas public schools undertake their third year of implementing site-based decision making (SBDM), it becomes increasingly important to examine the extent to which SBDM has achieved its purported goals. This paper examined how Texas public school districts might effect mandated governance changes through the political phenomenon known as…