The passage of Title I of the 1965 Elementary Secondary Education Act embodied not only the high hopes of reformers, but also an implicit challenge. Title I implied that current practices are inadequate, and the schools were given the assignment of self-renewal. However, almost a decade after the passage of Title I, the general verdict is that…

In 1642, the Massachusetts General Court required parents to attend to the education of their children. Since then, the visions of the early colonists have fallen victim to rapid population expansion and a highly specialized technology, and the close ties between the school and the community have been seriously weakened. Recent reports, however,…

The U. S. Commissioner of Education discusses how State boards of education can make themselves more effective on behalf of many critically important causes in U.S. education today. He argues that State boards must take a tough, unequivocal position on some of the gross inequities that have stood for so long. Additionally, the five most critical…

Effective strategies for assisting Canadian Native communities to develop school boards included encouraging an unhurried adaptive learning process, providing guidance to achieve consensus, and allowing for an incubation period. Impediments to development included community members' avoidance of leadership roles, cross-cultural misunderstandings,…

Collaborative research effort between the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Office of Educational Leadership provided ethnographic data on the perceptions of principals at 22 schools participating in an educational transformation/shared-governance process. Findings show that awareness of obstacles to change is a necessary first step toward…

Drawing from general experience and specific examples from the New Beginnings program in San Diego (California), outlines roles and responsibilities for school superintendents, board members, principals, and teachers involved in implementing school-linked services. Calls for increased accountability to measure progress toward defined goals. (SLD)

The fall 1987 Chicago (Illinois) teachers' strike, documentation of the systems' problems, a movement to return local control, a history of organizing, the fall 1986 Education Summit, and skepticism about the board's ability to engineer change led to the school system's restructuring through the Chicago Public Schools Reform Act. (JB)

Although empowerment is a necessary change in improving education, the typical school system is not organized or governed in a way that encourages significant change. Educational systems need to be restructured to achieve decentralization in order for organizations to be ready for changes like empowerment. The current structure encourages…

In nongraded education, children of different ages and ability levels are taught together and make continuous progress rather than being promoted once per year. Research studies support nongraded primary education by indicating that young children vary in their rates of intellectual development and learn best through hands-on activities with…

Nongraded primary education is the practice of teaching children of different ages and ability levels together, without dividing them or the curriculum into steps labeled by "grade" designations. Changing from graded to nongraded structure requires a major investment of time, energy, and commitment on the part of teachers and…

School barriers to equal access need to be removed by fundamentally new policy initiatives at the state and district levels in order to assure educational opportunities for at-risk students. Gender, race, poverty and individual disabilities continue to generate barriers for at-risk students despite broad legal efforts at reform. The following…

The Institute for Responsive Education and its study team are looking at ways to widen the scope of collective bargaining to provide room for communities to participate in policy formulation in their schools. The traditional management-labor approach was designed to resolve differences about wages, fringe benefits, and the rules, rights, and…

This report on alternative educational systems presents an overview of some current theories and proposals for educational reform as background to the description of development of three alternative schools in Toronto. The evolution of schools formed by groups outside the public system and established under the jurisdiction of the Toronto Board of…

The National Project on Ethnic America has been focusing considerable attention over the past few years on the multi-cultural dimensions of American education, and particularly those areas in need of revision, reform and innovation. We have designed an approach which extends beyond "ethnic studies," to a more comprehensive rubric that we call…

A historical analysis of the ways in which representatives of the business and professional communities were able to control the development of a city school system, based on documentation from the 1920's to the late 1960's in the Cincinnati, Ohio, school system. (Author/DCS)