This case positions the reader as the superintendent of Jefferson City Public Schools (pseudonym). Like many urban school districts in the United States, Jefferson City faces a complex milieu of fiscal challenges attributed to inadequate state funding and declining student enrollment. Within this case, the superintendent must address the failing…

Case studies of two high schools that have been turned around from failing to successful show different ways in which failing high schools can be made to succeed. Both high schools concentrated on first helping incoming freshman, and both reforms were driven by data. They differed in staffing and the focus of their first year of reform.

Today, the US public educational landscape features both well-funded and richly resourced segregated white schools and underfunded, poorly resourced majority black, Latino, Native American, and poor schools. Efforts to remedy these problems are ongoing and varied. Some parents and educators have turned away from traditional public schools and have…

Since the days when the country was dotted with one-room schoolhouses, many changes have taken place in school governance and management. In 1940, there were over 117,000 public school districts in the United States. In 2000, there were fewer than 15,000, even though the student population of the country had doubled in that time. While school…

Describes metaphorical analysis to help administrators gain organizational knowledge and insights in case study of a hypothetical organization. (Contains 25 references.) (PKP)

Small elementary schools are frequently perceived as having discrete organizational problems that are intensified when such schools are located in rural areas. Article reports a study conducted in a Welsh local education authority that established clustering arrangements to resolve some managerial, administrative, and curricular problems. Views…

Theories concerning the organizational dynamics underlying the dispersion of institutional research activities within colleges are proposed. Two theoretical arguments concern whether or not a centralized, monopolistic institutional research office will be found on a given campus: the informational legitimacy argument and the limited attention…

Traditional school administrative policy often establishes the structure and organization of the school first; from this structure, the program and curriculum then follow. By contrast, a case study is offered of an educational change as support for the reverse sequence, whereby the school program can be the determiner of school organization. (CJH)

The implementation of a matrix structure as an alternative to the traditional collegial/bureaucratic form at a college of education in a medium-size state university is described. Matrix organizational structures are differentiated from hierarchical bureaucratic structures by dividing the organization's tasks into functional units across which an…

Five years ago, Robert E. Lee High School was a big school with big problems. Overcrowding at the 3,100-student school forced some students to use air-conditioning units for chairs. Hallway fights broke out daily. At least half the freshmen disappeared from the roll books before reaching 12th grade. The thing to do, school leaders decided, was to…

This article presents new systems produced by systemic change. First is Systemic Changes in the Chugach School District by Wendy Battino and Jo Clem. Second is Systemic Changes in Public Schools through Brain-Based Learning by Renate N. Caine. Third is A Vision of an Information-Age Educational System by Charles M. Reigeluth. Fourth is Systemic…

A team of faculty and students from a principal preparation program sought to discover how administrators and teachers in two culturally diverse middle schools were implementing the concept of learning community. The purposes of the study was to: (1) Explore how administrators and teachers defined learning communities; (2) Determine how the two…

Five models of organizational decision-making are described, and a case study of the rational model as seen in the budget process at Stanford University during the 1970s is presented. Several issues are addressed to help administrators who are interested in increasing the organization's rational decision-making. The five models are as follows: the…

This study is based on an external assessment of the School Self-Renewal Program in New York City. The program represents the largest and longest running Organization Development (OD) program in the country. Twelve of 24 high schools participating in the program in 1977 were sampled. The renewal model employed for school based change was found to…

The most important date in the Boston University Chelsea Partnership was not the day in 1989 when the initial partnership agreement was signed. Nor was it the date in 1997 when the School Committee voted unanimously to renew the partnership for five additional years. If an objective history of the Boston University-Chelsea Partnership were…