In response to concerns regarding school quality, state policy-makers reformed their charter school authorization processes to impose greater regulatory barriers to chartering. These barriers to market entry could impose substantial burdens for Black and Latino would-be charter operators, as well as independent operators, who may lack access to…

The issue of school safety is of paramount concern but what is lacking is clarity on the best course of action aimed at bolstering safety in public schools. We sought to answer the following research questions: What topics are addressed in school board policies related to arming employees? What outlying policy topics are addressed in school board…

Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state-local dichotomy. Using interview data (n = 45) from six case-study states, we analyzed local leaders', state-internal actors', and state-external…

This report provides six mini-case studies of higher education policy reforms enacted in other states, exploring the important role that state policy leadership played in developing, promoting, and implementing these policies aimed at improving higher education outcomes, and discussing the relevance of each reform effort for California. This…

Over 100 former board of education members from Oregon completed a questionnaire originally prepared by the "American School Board Journal" for the purpose of investigating why school board members leave their positions. This document presents the full results of the Oregon survey and also provides a summary of the findings and an…

A survey of a random sample of 165 Oregon school board members examined the degree to which they agreed with four standards for appropriate school board behavior. The standards were drawn from the literature intended to educate school board members about their proper roles. The respondents agreed strongly with three of the standards: that the…

This study is intended to stimulate rapid adoption of long-range planning in Oregon education. A principal study goal has been to review present planning activities in the state and determine future planning needs. Emphasis has been placed on long-range planning as a specific process that should and can be incorporated within the organizational…

The director of curriculum support services at Oregon's Wasco Education Service District discusses methods that superintendents, board members, and school leaders can use to control conflicts in their school organizations. Surveyed were 239 Oregon school board members and 135 superintendents who were asked to identify which of the following…

A study of the attitudes of institutional and state level postsecondary education leaders in Oregon toward competition among institutions and state regulation of competition is reported, and a framework for examining postsecondary education regulation in general is provided. (MSE)

This study attempts to understand educational priorities through an investigation of budget choices made by 46 Oregon school districts. Two-thirds of the sample districts did not experience stringent fiscal constraint; the remainder showed budget allocation patterns favoring instruction at the expense of administrative and other areas. Includes 20…

Cross-sectional analysis of 1971-1972 budget elections and expenditure data in 111 large K-12 school districts in Oregon indicates that the "agenda control" and "fiscal illusion" models predict expenditure levels better than the standard "median voter" model. The median voter model assumes that district expenditures…

This report explores state level governance as it is currently practiced in the states of Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, and Washington. After a brief introduction, section II's attention to the evolution of state boards offers a historical perspective of state intervention in educational policy-making, a review of major questions concerning the…

As faculty and other public sector unions become more sophisticated in collective bargaining, they tend to lay a greater variety of demands on the table. This, in turn, forces the employer to ask, Do I really have to bargain about these subjects? As more employers refuse to bargain, more unions charge them with failing to bargain in good faith,…