Improving America's Schools

Improving America's Schools PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309054362
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
Reform of American education is largely motivated by concerns about our economic competitiveness and American's standard of living. Yet, few if any of the public school reform agendas incorporate economic principles or research findings. Improving America's Schools explores how education and economic research can help produce, in the words of Harvard's Dale W. Jorgenson, "a unified framework for future education reform." This book presents the perspectives of noted experts, including Eric A. Hanushek, author of Making Schools Work, on creating incentives for improved school and student performance; Under Secretary of Education Marshall S. Smith on the Clinton Administration's reform program; and Rebecca Maynard, University of Pennsylvania, on the education of the disadvantaged. This volume explores these areas: The importance of schooling to labor market success. The prospects for combining school-based management with teacher incentives to gain the best of both approaches. The potential of recent innovations in student achievement testing, including new "value-added" indicators. The economic factors involved in maintaining an adequate stock of effective teachers. The volume also explores why, despite similar standards of living, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the United States produce different levels of education achievement. Improving America's Schools informs the current debate over school reform with a fresh perspective, examples, and data. This readable volume will be of interest to policymakers, researchers, educators, and education administrators as well as economists and employersâ€"it is also readily accessible to concerned parents and the larger community.

Improving America's Schools

Improving America's Schools PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309054362
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Get Book Here

Book Description
Reform of American education is largely motivated by concerns about our economic competitiveness and American's standard of living. Yet, few if any of the public school reform agendas incorporate economic principles or research findings. Improving America's Schools explores how education and economic research can help produce, in the words of Harvard's Dale W. Jorgenson, "a unified framework for future education reform." This book presents the perspectives of noted experts, including Eric A. Hanushek, author of Making Schools Work, on creating incentives for improved school and student performance; Under Secretary of Education Marshall S. Smith on the Clinton Administration's reform program; and Rebecca Maynard, University of Pennsylvania, on the education of the disadvantaged. This volume explores these areas: The importance of schooling to labor market success. The prospects for combining school-based management with teacher incentives to gain the best of both approaches. The potential of recent innovations in student achievement testing, including new "value-added" indicators. The economic factors involved in maintaining an adequate stock of effective teachers. The volume also explores why, despite similar standards of living, France, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the United States produce different levels of education achievement. Improving America's Schools informs the current debate over school reform with a fresh perspective, examples, and data. This readable volume will be of interest to policymakers, researchers, educators, and education administrators as well as economists and employersâ€"it is also readily accessible to concerned parents and the larger community.

Decentralization and School-based Management

Decentralization and School-based Management PDF Author: Daniel J. Brown
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9781850006015
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The aims and origins of decentralization are examined and its effects on school flexibility, accountability, and productivity are explored in some depth. Administrators and others tell their stories. This volume offers an analysis of how school-based management works.

Decentralization and Service Delivery

Decentralization and Service Delivery PDF Author:
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN:
Category : Decentralization in government
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description
Dissatisfied with centralized approaches to delivering local public services, a large number of countries are decentralizing responsibility for these services to lower-level, locally elected governments. The results have been mixed. The paper provides a framework for evaluating the benefits and costs, in terms of service delivery, of different approaches to decentralization, based on relationships of accountability between different actors in the delivery chain. Moving from a model of central provision to that of decentralization to local governments introduces a new relationship of accountability-between national and local policymakers-while altering existing relationships, such as that between citizens and elected politicians. Only by examining how these relationships change can we understand why decentralization can, and sometimes cannot, lead to better service delivery. In particular, the various instruments of decentralization-fiscal, administrative, regulatory, market, and financial-can affect the incentives facing service providers, even though they relate only to local policymakers. Likewise, and perhaps more significantly, the incentives facing local and national politicians can have a profound effect on the provision of local services. Finally, the process of implementing decentralization can be as important as the design of the system in influencing service delivery outcomes.

Decentralization and Accountability in Public Education

Decentralization and Accountability in Public Education PDF Author: Paul Thomas Hill
Publisher: RAND Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
This report distills the experience of school systems that have instituted site-based management. Site-based management involves shifting the initiatives in public education from schoo boards, superintendents, and central administrative offices to individual schools.

Federalism and Education

Federalism and Education PDF Author: Kenneth K. Wong
Publisher: IAP
ISBN: 1641131748
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Federalism has played a central role in charting educational progress in many countries. With an evolving balance between centralization and decentralization, federalism is designed to promote accountability standards without tempering regional and local preferences. Federalism facilitates negotiations both vertically between the central authority and local entities as well as horizontally among diverse interests. Innovative educational practices are often validated by a few local entities prior to scaling up to the national level. Because of the division of revenue sources between central authority and decentralized entities, federalism encourages a certain degree of fiscal competition at the local and regional level. The balance of centralization and decentralization also varies across institutional and policy domains, such as the legislative framework for education, drafting of curricula, benchmarking for accountability, accreditation, teacher training, and administrative responsibilities at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. Given these critical issues in federalism and education, this volume examines ongoing challenges and policy strategies in ten countries, namely Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States. These chapters and the introductory overview aim to examine how countries with federal systems of government design, govern, finance, and assure quality in their educational systems spanning from early childhood to secondary school graduation. Particular attention is given to functional division between governmental layers of the federal system as well as mechanisms of intergovernmental cooperation both vertically and horizontally. The chapters aim to draw out comparative lessons and experiences in an area of great importance to not only federal countries but also countries that are emerging toward a federal system.

School Decentralization

School Decentralization PDF Author: Bruce Allen Bimber
Publisher: RAND Corporation
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
It is possible to give a concrete meaning to the usually vague concept of decentralization by examining four core components. First, at the crux of decentralization is a downward shift in decision-making power. Administrative decentralization entails shifts internal to the institution. Political decentralization shifts authority to external forces such as community boards. These two strategies are not mutually exclusive. Second, studies of bureaucracies demonstrate that decentralization is compatible with strong leaders provided that leadership is exercised at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy. Third, decentralization requires the rejection of existing reward structures in favor of a system of incentives that establishes meaningful connections between professional conduct and rewards. Fourth, it is important to design a division of responsibility for ends and means among the district and schools that diminishes the role of explicit rules. Most school districts reflect few of these four principles, and their efforts and decentralization are often marginalized and incomplete. Experiences to date with site-based management, the most common attempt at decentralization, demonstrate the difficulty in producing authentic decentralization. (Contains 51 references.) (TEJ)

Decentralisation, School-Based Management, and Quality

Decentralisation, School-Based Management, and Quality PDF Author: Joseph Zajda
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9048127033
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
This book, which is the eighth volume in the 12-volume book series Globalisation, Comparative Education and Policy Research, presents scholarly research on major discourses in decentralisation, school-based management (SBM) and quality in education globally. This book, which focuses on decentralisation and SBM as a governance strategy in education, presents theoretical aspects of the phenomenon of decentralisation/privatisation and contextualises them within the education research literature. It provides an easily accessible, practical yet scholarly source of information concerning the dynamics of decentralisation and SBM that normally take place when reforms are instituted to decentralize authority and power. Above all, the authors offering the latest findings regarding major discourses in dec- tralisation, SBM and quality in educational systems in the global culture emphasise aspects of that dynamic interactive process (see also Geo-JaJa 2006a; Gamage and Sooksomchitra 2006, Zajda 2009). This dynamic interaction in the process that is implicit in the title of the book is reified by calls for restructuring of schools f- lowing the idea that schools are not promoting human rights, social cohesion and sustainable development. The chapters as a source book of ideas for researchers, practitioners and policy makers in decentralisation and SBM in education contr- ute to the educational literature while enhancing the understanding of the larger dynamics involved in educational reform. It offers a timely overview of current issues affecting decentralisation in education in the global culture.

Decentralized Governance and Accountability

Decentralized Governance and Accountability PDF Author: Jonathan A. Rodden
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110849790X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Reviews recent lessons about decentralized governance and implications for future development programs and policies.

Decentralized Decision-making in Schools

Decentralized Decision-making in Schools PDF Author: Harry Anthony Patrinos
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821379704
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
An increasing number of developing countries are introducing School-Based Management (SBM) reforms aimed at empowering principals and teachers or at strengthening their professional motivation, thereby enhancing their sense of ownership of the school. Many of these reforms have also strengthened parental involvement in the schools, sometimes by means of school councils. SBM programs take many different forms in terms of who has the power to make decisions as well as the degree of ecision-making devolved to the school level. While some programs transfer authority only to school principals or te.

Educational Decentralization

Educational Decentralization PDF Author: Christopher Bjork
Publisher: Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects
ISBN:
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Decentralization and Education: Asian Experiences and Conceptual Contributions examines the specific ways in which decentralization policies have affected the structure and delivery of education in eleven Asian nations. Written by top scholars in the field, the case studies provide detailed and rich empirical evidence documenting the tensions as well as synchronisms between the ideas that form the basis of decentralization policy and the contexts into which they are introduced. The high quality of this collection of essays and the careful attention to local contexts for implementation will make this book a must read for academics, policy planners, practitioners, and students of Asia.