Roadmap to Restructuring: Charting the Course of Change in American Education

by David T. Conley

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0865521379
• ISBN13: 9780865521377
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Eric Clearinghouse On Educational Management
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 1.5" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Summary of Roadmap To Restructuring

A tremendous amount has been written about school restructuring during the past half-dozen years. Writers and researchers have investigated, discussed, and debated the need and rationale for change in public education, the various strategies being attempted, their relative effectiveness, and the difficulty of bringing about change in public schools.This wealth of information has not been easily available to practitioners. It is widely dispersed in journals, papers, and unpublished, hard-to-find documents. When school people begin to consider restructuring, it is not easy for them to assemble the resources that might aid their discussions and decisions.This book is designed to help address this need, at least in part. It is an attempt to assemble many of the salient works on school restructuring that have appeared in print since discussions on the topic began in earnest in the mid-1980s. But this book goes beyond simply summarizing the writing in this area. Its goal is to provide a conceptual framework within which restructuring activities and processes can be considered; to provoke thinking, discussion, and questions regarding restructuring; and to enable readers to go beyond this text to many other sources that will deepen their understanding of ideas presented here.The book draws from more than 600 sources across a wide spectrum of perspectives and beliefs regarding restructuring. It incorporates and builds upon several of my earlier works on this topic, along with information I gleaned from discussions and interviews with practitioners. Additional insights have come from my role as a school restructuring consultant, as a site facilitator for nine schools participating in a U.S. Department of Education grant designed to enable schools to take the "next step" in restructuring, and more recently as director of a project that works with 30 high schools to develop proficiency-based college admission standards for Oregon's public colleges and universities. This book provides a picture of many of the trends and issues in school restructuring and attempts to place these issues into a context that helps explain where schools have come from and where they might be going. The book is designed to serve as a tool to help faculties develop their vision of school restructuring and their strategies for pursuing the process of restructuring. It might also be used profitably as a resource for principals, administrators, and boards of education who are trying to understand in greater detail this concept and its implications.My goal in writing this book is to help educators, community members, and policy-makers understand more clearly why many educators are trying to restructure education, what people may mean when they talk about restructuring, what a few select schools are doing, and how the process of attempting fundamental change in education is being played out.I hope that this book will enable the reader to have a more