Survey found 57 percent of high school seniors reported drinking in previous month, down from 72 percent in 1980. Although illicit drug use is also down, alcohol abuse among U.S. teens remains alarmingly high. Schools should back up iron-fisted reaction to drinking with comprehensive drug/alcohol program long on prevention and intervention.…

To help keep students alcohol- and drug-free, some principals have extended local school policies beyond campus boundaries. Before proceeding, principals must consider who should frame the policy, appropriate verification procedures, policy parameters, and policy initiation particulars. A Maryland high school's cocurricular participation contract…

With the demands of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), the focus of the principal's role is providing instructional leadership in the school. However, one of the first things a school community expects from the principal is that management issues--particularly for special events that occur every year--are successfully administered and organized.…

This report summarizes results of the 2006-2007 Austin Independent School District parent survey.

This report examines the progress of school desegregation to date and the price paid for it by Southern black students and school personnel. It describes one successful integration plan in the West, and also reports on the substance of proposed legislation to provide federal and national direction for quality integrated education. (Authors/DM)

This study investigated whether selected elementary teachers, secondary teachers, and administrators felt that their schools and school systems were implementing effective school components within the overall curricula. The major effective school components were academics, teacher collaboration, and discipline policy. The 116 respondents completed…

Some of the most important decisions that your school council will make or consider are issues about personnel. This document provides technical assistance and references to law, regulation and legal opinions that help clarify personnel issues for school councils in Kentucky School-Based Decision-Making Schools.

Recent incidents in the Baltimore and Piscatawny (New Jersey) school districts reveal a new ethical problem: how to treat school leaders' out-of-school relationships with private companies doing business with their districts. Contracting for instructional services could lead to collusion between administrators and contractors. Strict financial…

Principals desiring to develop a school-uniform policy should involve parents, teachers, community leaders, and student representatives; beware restrictions on religious and political expression; provide flexibility and assistance for low-income families; implement a pilot program; align the policy with school-safety issues; and consider legal…

Purpose: The authors adapted distributed cognition theory to provide a detailed account of how school leaders use knowledge of the new programs, existing initiatives, and school contexts to guide policy implementation. Research Design: The study used distributed cognition theory to show how policy implementation studies provide an occasion to…

This document records the proceedings of a conference on the effects of collective bargaining on school administrative leadership. The conference brought together participants from two areas of research that usually operate independently--research on collective bargaining and research on school administrative leadership. The conference was divided…

The burden of managing a secondary school is unequally distributed when staff and students perceive one administrator to be consistently difficult to deal with. This problem can be avoided with the "Gray Hat" strategy, in which administrators alternate in yielding and nonyielding roles. (KH)

Only 10% of schools have achieved genuine partnerships with their families and communities. This article summarizes decades of research demonstrating the importance of risk-taking principals, teacher engagement, diverse involvement opportunities, outside facilitators, family-welcoming strategies, learning at home, effective school-home…

Some schools are replacing rule-bound discipline programs with instruction that helps students make ethical judgments and decisions. A recent review of 40 classroom-management studies finds teachers responsible for designing lessons that engage and motivate students, communicating procedural expectations, and using unobtrusive techniques to hold…

Examines effects of the National Urban League's Systemic Initiative reforms in four cities: Chicago, El Paso, Memphis, and Miami, based on an analysis of interviews with 47 principals. Principals must balance the demands of systemic math and science reforms with those of multilevel accountability policies. Such alignments may be unachievable.…