A new high school on a remote inland in Belize offers important educational opportunities to students who previously only had access to primary education. This qualitative case study applied Patterson's (2000) Culture of Poverty to understand challenges that exist that keep students from achieving their academic potential despite new opportunities…

The traditional vehicle for collection of information from parents about a school's goals is a questionnaire that provides alternative goal statements. Two problems are frequently associated with such questionnaires: the goal lists suggest that a school can achieve all desired goals simultaneously; and many surveys use stimulus questions that are…

Findings from a study that examined the perceptions of different educational stakeholders about the context of schools and educational change are presented in this paper, which views educational change from within a transformational framework. The focus is not only on goals, but also on the beliefs and expectations of the stakeholders in the…

Public schools are often faced, when engaged in the task of developing annual goals, with the necessity of soliciting public input. To gather reliable input from the school community has been haphazard and uneven. Consolidated High School District 230 (Palos Hills, Illinois) employed the Public Opinion Laboratory, a professional survey firm, to…

Brookwood School, a private K-8 day school in Manchester (Massachusetts), evaluates itself through community and parental perceptions, comparisons with local private schools, personnel and curriculum evaluations, standardized test results, questionnaires to recent graduates and to faculty at private secondary schools, and its recent long-range…

This report examines the opinions of 726 registered voters in 5 small, rural mid-west school districts. The purposes of the study were: (1) to assess citizens' satisfaction with the school districts' programs and services; (2) to indicate strengths and weaknesses in the school districts' programs and services; (3) to identify problems facing the…

This paper describes a survey-based needs assessment method for school districts using multiple constituency groups. The constituency groups included are: the general public, community leaders, parents, students, graduates, and professional educators. The method requires polling the groups using telephone surveys, mailed surveys, or group…

The Assessment-Confrontation-Strategizing Model for developing parent and community involvement in school decision-making consists of three stages. In the assessment stage parent perceptions of the permeability of the school's psychosocial boundaries are examined and the differing educational values held by teachers, administrators, and…

The findings of an ethnographic study of schooling and work in a small rural community in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York are reported. More than half the school children in the community live in poverty. Research explores the relationships between patterns of adult work and the schooling of children, and between schooled and…

This study sought to determine characteristics of schools and districts that enjoy the public's strong confidence and to explore how these characteristics are created and retained. A screening procedure produced useable data from 181 "high-confidence" public schools, 30 private schools, and 45 school districts. As part of a preliminary…

The Arlington, Washington, School District--a mostly rural district with enrollment of 2,790--conducted a survey of its public using both blanket mailing and random sampling procedures in order to compare the views of the total population with the views of the typically small percentage who mail back a questionnaire. The questionnaire contained 29…

Community education programs have seldom presented quantitative data to validate the usefulness of the program. This study was an attempt to establish a beginning community education program while planning for quantitative evaluation from the initiation of the project. Based on a group process, community residents were involved in the development…

This study investigated the perceptions of various stakeholders concerning the current and future roles and functions of the Middle East Technical University (METU), a leading large public university in Turkey. The data used in this paper were derived from a larger research project that was designed to assess the quality of various dimensions of…

The amount of support and the degree of satisfaction with available support to rural and metropolitan parents of handicapped preschoolers was studied by analyzing parents' responses to mailed questionnaires assessing family background and demographic characteristics and the mothers' perceptions of the availability and quality of support systems in…

A longitudinal study examined the factors affecting the long-term success of a midwestern tech prep consortium consisting of one community college and four counties with a mix of rural, urban, and suburban communities. The study was designed to identify the effects of systematic change over time from the following perspectives: students' skill…