This article reviews existing literature on school-based management policy and research and highlights several themes related to both why school-based management does not work and how it can be designed to be more effective. The intended purpose is to offer new directions for school-based management policy and research, based on what is already known and where knowledge deficiencies lie. The results from the review suggest that future policy and research ought to expand its purview of school-based management to include more than just delegating budget, personnel, and curriculum decisions to schools and to join school-based management as a governance reform with content (curriculum and instruction) reforms so as to enhance the possibilities for improving educational practice.
By the end of 1994, 11 states had passed legislation authorizing charter schools. Following the argument that charter schools need to be autonomous, self-governing organizations to enhance their potential for high performance, this study explores legislative conditions that promote charter school autonomy. The study applies a conceptual framework of autonomy to assess variations among state charter school policies. 7he results suggest that state policies offer different levels of autonomy and thus charter schools will vary in their ability to innovate and in their potential for high performance. Differences in autonomy across charter school laws appear to be related to state political cultures and to the state's history of decentralization reform.
Research suggests that decentralized management reforms have produced changes in classroom practice and higher student achievement in some schools. However, many schools simply do not have the capacity to improve on their own. A few school districts are experimenting with a new approach to school reform—school networks—that relies on collaboration between schools. This article draws on data from an evaluation of the Annenberg Challenge in Los Angeles, a reform effort that experimented with school networks as a vehicle for improving schools. As a theoretical framework, the authors applied Lawler's (1991) high-involvement model, which suggests that in order for an organization's improvement efforts to be successful, resources must be decentralized, and stakeholders must be actively collaborating on the reform process. The authors found that when school networks created structures that decentralized power and distributed organizational resources throughout the network, they also enhanced school capacity for reform.
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