Local school districts have gradually lost policy-making discretion to state legislatures and bureaucracies. State-mandated reforms of school finance and academic standards (especially those involving curricular alignment with standardized tests) tend to diminish teacher autonomy and creativity, disrupt school climate, and ignore individual school…

The origin and extent of program reduction and discontinuance at colleges and universities, the elements of program review, and a framework for developing long-range organizational planning are considered. Program discontinuance refers to the merger of related programs, the elimination of certain degrees or programs within departments, and the…

Statewide planning for higher education and the approaches that states take to budgeting and accountability are reviewed in this monograph. Statewide planning involves identifying problems and collecting relevant data, analyzing interrelationships among variables, and choosing the most desirable alternatives to reach objectives. State-level higher…

The role of individual institutions and college-state agency cooperation in reducing program duplication is discussed. Declining enrollments and financial problems have necessitated determining what courses/programs will be offered at which institutions. At the freshman and sophomore level, states usually require that community colleges and…

Chief state school officers in all 50 states were surveyed to gather information regarding the various states' funding arrangements for small and/or isolated rural schools and to develop a financial planning tool for use by state legislators and boards of education. Data were gathered from every state except Hawaii. Twenty-eight states had some…

Four documents and seven journal articles on the management of enrollment decline, selected from those recently made available through the ERIC system, are described briefly in this report. Topics covered in the items listed include what can be done at the state level, suggestions for projecting enrollment, how instructional space is being…

The major distinctions between evaluation and research are examined, the chief differences being the intent and type of criteria against which judgments are made. Conceptualization of the evaluation process in higher education is discussed on two levels. A collection of nine similes for understanding evaluation is examined in terms of major…