Trends of educational change in (formerly) East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria are examined as restructuring takes place during the establishment of democratic political processes. These trends are culled from over 50 onsite semistructured interviews in August 1990, as part of a longitudinal study to document educational…

Restructuring is a reorganization that replaces central planning, control, and supervision with a deregulated, decentralized system in which the "bottom line" counts most. Seven explanations for restructuring are outlined, each reflecting a particular position or perspective : (1) a crisis in legitimization involving the dimensions of the…

The general aim of this book is to provide a focussed discussion on decentralization and school-based management. In part 1, chapter 1, some problems, anticipations, and a recommendation concerning decentralization are presented. In part 2, chapters 2 through 6 review literature about the structural view of organizations, rationality and…

Analysis of data collected in six elementary schools reveals that the amount and quality of choices in school are strongly linked to positive attitudes about teachers and school and thus to learner interest. (Author)

Public elementary education in the United States and South Vietnam are compared with respect to governance, support, teachers and teacher training, school organization, curriculum and many other characteristics of schooling. (JH)

Explores judgments and values in three distinct, though interrelated, areas of the elementary school: organizational and instructional plans, instructional designs and methods, and pupils' perceived needs. (Author/SDH)

A school improvement effort that provided individually tailored reports on school effectiveness to 93 schools across the Commonwealth of Kentucky is analyzed. Dilemmas confronted by the individualized school reports explain why so little change was generated. The background for the research project from which the individual school reports were…

Given that the physical, emotional, and social metamorphosis of today's early adolescents differs chronologically from that of adolescents a century ago, school districts must identify the middle level school grade configuration that will best accommodate local student developmental needs. Educators must first identify the age at which local…

To analyze organizational development of Swedish universities and colleges, decision theory and implementation theory were examined. Attention was directed to the following models of decision-making: the demographic model, the incremental model, the garbage-can model, and the political model. The focus was on system decision-making, and empirical…

In this paper the authors extend an earlier study that developed images of what schools are like as social entities. That study found that elementary schools correspond to the rational bureaucratic image, whereas secondary schools are more loosely coupled systems. The study was limited by a small sample. In this paper the research was extended to…

As part of its school restructuring work with states, the National Governors' Association commissioned the Center for Policy Research on Education to conduct case studies of several local school districts experimenting with new structural arrangements. This case study is based on visits to four such districts: Jefferson County Schools (Louisville,…

This personal account of a central office administrator's involvement in the Riverside (California) Unified School District's decentralization effort discusses the problems facing the rapidly growing district in the early 1960's, kinds of interventions required to break out of old attitudes toward schooling and school administration, and some…

Joint action among teachers appears to depend on the teachers' perceptions of their interdependence and the presence of opportunities for joint action. An urban middle school had been organized into teams on several levels with strong support from the principal. Three situations that altered these operating procedures provided evidence that…

This is a case study of a successful school consultation in which it was proposed to the Board of Education that the initiative for change be handed back to the faculty. Focus was upon the initiation of certain processes, with product being a secondary consideration. (Author)

This paper discusses the congruence between various types of teaching and learning in representative science curriculum projects and the organizational patterns of secondary schooling common at the present time in England, Scotland, the United States and Australia. (JH)