Volunteers from community organizations in six southern states monitored 21 school districts to find their districts' initial answer to Title IX, federal legislation barring sex discrimination. The actual monitoring of the 21 districts was completed in the late spring of 1976, with data covering the first year of Title IX implementation. The…

This administrator's guide is intended to aid local school administrators who formulate policies and procedures for dealing with drug-involved students. The guide suggests alternatives for those engaged in such policy-making rather than mandating a single course of action for all school districts. The guide is not intended to limit a community's…

In this article, the author features Multi-Cultural Academy Charter School in Philadelphia, the only Philadelphia's charter high school that meets the adequate yearly progress testing benchmarks in 2003 as established by No Child Left Behind, and describes how the academy's headmaster and founder, Vuong Thuy, confronted criticisms from the…

The relationship between Board of Education policy designed to promote cultural, ethnic, and racial understanding, and the instructional materials most widely available and used in the Chicago (Illinois) Public Schools was studied. Teachers, district administrators, and principals were surveyed to understand the process of selecting and evaluating…

The existence of board policy and/or administrative procedures for conducting field trips may relieve teacher anxieties about their responsibilities during such trips and induce them to use this instructional tool more frequently. Unfortunately, such policies or procedures often do not exist or are unwritten and therefore open to question. This…

This report examines the types of professional development necessary to implement successful online learning initiatives. The potential for schools utilizing online learning is tremendous: schools can develop new distribution methods to enable equity and access for all students, they can provide high quality content for all students and they can…

Personnel management constitutes a substantial proportion of the elementary school principal's responsibilities. Constructive ways in which principals can identify and effectively confront deterioration of staff job performance are discussed in this newsletter. Effective interpersonal confrontation involves preparation, active listening,…

To assess the impact of the 1984 Alberta Education teacher evaluation policy, this study investigated the formal teacher evaluation practices of superintendents, other central office staff, and principals in Alberta (Canada) in 1983-84. A three part, mailed questionnaire based on existing instruments collected: (1) demographic data on the…

This study focuses on a formerly all-black high school, which formed one-half of the dual school system in North Carolina, in order to assess both the direct and indirect functions that the school may have performed in developing leadership skills, apprenticeship opportunities, and the total development of the black community. Seven reasons…

This paper takes a distributed perspective on leadership practice in schools. Drawing upon empirical evidence from two contemporary studies of successful school leadership and the international research base concerning distributed leadership, the paper argues that leadership practice is a distributed entity that is mediated through human…

This document is comprised of the six issues in volume 16 of the Harvard Education Letter, a bimonthly newsletter addressing current issues in elementary and secondary education. Articles in this volume include the following: (1) January-February--"Grade Inflation: What's Really behind All Those A's?" (Birk) and "Every Friday was Fight Day"…

This bulletin on the use of the schoolhouse as a polling place is divided into two sections. Part I, Use of Schoolhouse for Political Purposes, explains why this practice is beneficial to the schools (allows youth to witness and understand the civic process) and to the public (it is economical, worthy, appropriate, convenient, permanent,…

The purpose of this study was to assess the presence and/or implementation of Special Education activities within charter schools by questioning principals about the presence of children with disabilities in their schools, types of services provided in the charter schools, and the beliefs and attitudes of the principals regarding Special Education…

This case is about the clash between traditional community values and multicultural values in the context of same-sex couples at a high school prom. Within this context, a new principal must deal with competing personal and professional values, as well as the competing divergent views of district level administrators, school board members,…

Eight secondary schools participated in this study of the relationships among school policies, principal leadership style, teacher behavior, and student behavior. Data were gathered through student and teacher observations, student and teacher questionnaires, student absence records, observations of the physical environment, and interviews with…