Today's public school principals lead under conditions of significant pressures for change. At the local level, principals are the primary receivers and interpreters of the discourses and demands for change coming from central administration. Principals must make sense of these discourses and demands for change at the local school level, and they…

This dissertation examines how eight urban high schools responded to mandates to raise graduation requirements in mathematics. The change process was complicated by challenges such as the conditions of poverty, lack of adequate financial support for schools, and large numbers of students who come to high school with inadequate preparation in…

One of a series of monographs on the performance of Chicago public high school students from 1993 to 2000, this publication examines the upward trend of special education enrollment in high schools. This corresponds with a systemwide redesign of high schools in the 1995 implementation of high stakes accountability. It notes that the enrollment of…

This study identifies the policy variables that are effective in increasing student verbal achievement in urban grammar schools and high schools, and estimates the impact of these variables upon verbal achievement, expected years of education completed by a typical student, and expected lifetime earnings of a typical student. A theoretical model…

This report is the result of a year-long evaluation of special education in New York City (New York) and presents major recommendations for reorganizing general and special education. It proposes a school-based model with an integrated general/special education system, and use of an enrichment allocation from merged special and general education…