Despite a growing body of literature on the school superintendency, little is known about the role, influence, and satisfaction of district superintendents when school boards make compensation decisions for principals. This exploratory study, which reported findings from a sample of 215 Pennsylvania superintendents, attempted to identify and…

The nature of student college choice sets was studied. The characteristics of institutions that are assumed to be central to students' application decisions were identified, and students were grouped according to similarity in the types of institutions to which they sent their test scores. Data on 627 students were analyzed by a mode, cluster…

Sixty-one graduate student teachers (from seven urban, rural, and suburban districts) responded to five questions relating to how they viewed their involvement and importance in making decisions in the operation of their schools. Questions were designed by 14 teachers who met twice for about 2 hours each meeting. This development group believed…

The study examined principal input in decisions affecting administrative compensation through the framework of a state-mandated meet-and-discuss model. The model seeks to strengthen management team relationships while guaranteeing administrators a minimal level of participation. The following are discussed: (1) conceptual and empirical…

Recently there has been a resurgence in demand for citizen participation in public school decision-making. To directly assess the degree of this phenomenon, 30 public school districts were selected from Pennsylvania (excluding Philadelphia and Pittsburgh), based on a random sample, for a citizen attitude measurement questionnaire that yielded 320…

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…

This paper describes an ethnographic study of how fundamentalist Christian parents new to home schooling are socialized to norms, beliefs, and values of the Christian home schooling organizations with which they are affiliated. Research involved participant observation and interviews with "home schoolers" and educators over an 18-month…

Instruments to measure decision-making skills of grade 5, 8, and 11 students were developed as a part of Pennsylvania's statewide assessment program. A decision-making model was formulated based upon John Dewey's five major steps of the critical thinking process: (1) identify the problem; (2) establish the facts; (3) formulate the hypothesis; (4)…

Before there can be an understanding of politics, policy, and action in education, there must be an understanding of the value systems of policymakers. Policymakers, in their talk, in their choices of symbols and metaphors, in their choices of strategies for dealing with conflict, reveal their own needs, their role orientations, their group…

In 1991 Pennsylvania began implementation of a direct writing assessment at the sixth-grade and ninth-grade levels. A total of 18,758 sixth graders and 16,575 ninth graders wrote a response to 1 of 9 prompts reflecting 3 modes of writing. A six-point holistic scale was used to score the papers, with two readers scoring each paper. A third reader,…

The findings of a pilot study of Pennsylvania's School Performance Incentive (SPI) program are presented in this report. School level incentive policies as elements of the entrepreneurial context of educational restructuring and an organizational model for an incentive-based merit system are also discussed. The study examines the effect of SPI on…