The New Designs for the Comprehensive High School project should provide for an organization of the school that is aligned with learner outcomes and learning process. Components of the organization must be aligned among themselves. High school models for organizing learners that meet student needs for connectedness and improved interpersonal…

A study examined the organizational factors inhibiting and facilitating implementation of an innovation in an educational setting. The innovative program selected as the subject of this ethnographic study was Georgia's parenting education program. Data were collected from field interviews of teachers, observations of parenting education classes,…

Patterns of problem-solving activity in one middle-class urban high school are examined and a problem solving model rooted in a conceptual framework of contingency theory is presented. Contingency theory stresses that as political, economic, and social conditions in an organization's environment become problematic, the internal structures of the…

Describes the recommendations of the Carnegie Report to restructure the schools in ways that could transform teaching into a career worth pursuing and could produce the greatest possible gains for all students. Teachers need a better incentive structure and need to be invested with greater discretion in making professional judgments. (IW)

By expanding the school leadership team to include the school's counselors, the staff of a K-12 school successfully transformed many of their existing family-school routines into more collaborative efforts. We delineate the history of this change initiative, the goals and objectives for the change project, and the primary organizational change…

Renewed attention on educational quality is forcing educators to consider experimenting with new organizational structures for achieving public school objectives. Eight recent reports on the state of public precollegiate education in the United States address the need for better educational quality. Although the eight reports vary in emphasis,…

The current debate on educational choice concerns whether locally centralized school systems of the kind that predominate in the public school sector are responsive to and can accommodate the diversity of educational consumers' preferences. Section I analyzes policy options and illustrates how policymakers, by examining a range of solutions to the…

This ethnographic study of the creation of a new public university, California State University, Monterey Bay (CSUMB), highlighted the struggle of the founders to build a collective identity based on a distinctive vision for the 21st century. The original plan envisioned a model pluralistic academic community with a culture of innovation that…

This synthesis of recent literature on school effectiveness offers educators empirical research on which to base plans for staff development and school improvement. The introduction notes the limitations of effective schools research and points out its potential to clarify thought about schools. A section on instruction reviews research on…

Key features of the College of Education at the University of Saskatchewan in 1976 and actions that were taken in light of these features over the subsequent two-year period are considered by the College's dean, who began the appointment in 1976. Three major objectives established by the dean were to: increase the institution's productivity in all…