William Lowe Boyd

Decentralization, Devolution, and the School Principal: Australian Lessons on Statewide Educational Reform

Decentralization has been instituted as a reform effort aimed at accomplishing devolution in the Australian state of Victoria. This study documents this reform and investigates its implications for the principal-ship in Victorian schools. Interview data are presented to document implementation problems and the effects of these reforms on the influence of principals and the future of the principalship in Victoria.

Antipolitics, Education, and Institutional Choice: The Flight From Democracy

Schools are expected to accomplish a variety of goals in modern societies, ranging from enhancing economic competitiveness to ensuring equality of opportunity to protecting students from AIDS. Increasing numbers of education policy analysts of divergent political and scholarly persuasions agree that under present arrangements for educational governance schools have failed to achieve crucial public purposes. Agreement that present arrangements have failed is inevitably accompanied by intense disagreement about how schools should be governed, and it is therefore in the antipolitics of institutional choice that the main conflicts now emerge in the politics of education. Antipolitics is often associated with a willingness to dispense with democratic governance, in order to accomplish one or another of the public purposes to which schools are dedicated.

The Power of Paradigms: Reconceptualizing Educational Policy and Management

In most English-speaking nations, there has been a sea change since 1980 in how people think about educational policy and the management of schools. Moreover, despite significant differences in social and political traditions, there are striking parallels between these nations in the policies and reforms that have been adopted L These developments are clearly related to larger changes that have occurred in the way people think about the role of government and of the public services. This article argues that it is essential to scrutinize both the paradigms or theories influencing our thinking and the consequences of the biases built into them. Drawing on both the British and American experience, this article examines the dramatic shift that has occurred in educational policy and management, as both have been redirected by economic and outcome-oriented models.

The quest for a new hierarchy in education: from loose coupling back to tight?

Building on and reconsidering previous research on organizational models of education, the authors argue that while many administrators in education are still trying to manage ambiguous, and occasionally “anarchic” organizations effectively, the ambivalences of both loose and tight structures are today better understood than 25 years ago. In a development paralleling the evolution of organizational thinking in corporate management which no longer posits a “one‐best‐system hierarchy”, developments in education theory and practice point to the emergence of hybrid models of organization that capture the advantages of centralization and coordination produced by hierarchy while attempting to harness the advantages of more decentralized organizational structures.

The New Role of Community Development in Educational Reform

One co-authors (Crowson) participant during a mid-1970s ethnographic study of Chicago principals engaged in regular coffee-and-donut visits to the homes of his elementary school pupils. During a midmorning hour every few weeks, the principal would join a half dozen adults in the apartment of a host parent to chat without agenda about the school, pupils and teachers, and the community. All the home visits were just a few minutes walk from the rear door of the school, for this K-6 elementary was on the grounds of and served two units comprising Chicagos infamous Robert Taylor Homes (a now-demolished, high-rise public housing project on the south side of the city). The author joined the principal on two of these home visits, enjoying coffee and delicious, just-baked pastries served with a best-dishes formality, in what was obviously a very important social occasion for the families

Balancing Public and Private Schools: The Australian Experience and American Implications

Australia has been touted as a model for how the United States might benefit by undertaking public funding of private schools. However, the advocates of this view have glossed over some very significant problems. A consideration of both the successful and unsuccessful features of the Australian approach suggests that Americans should be cautious about emulating this model. More broadly, cross-national research shows that a delicate balance in public policy must be struck if there is to be parity of esteem between public and private schools and equality of opportunity as well as excellence and choice in education. Because the policy changes necessary to achieve this balance are unpopular with both public and private school advocates, the political prospects for achieving this fragile balance are dim.

The Politics of Privatization in American Education

The long-sustained effort of conservatives and their think tanks and media outlets to win support for school choice, market forces, and privatization schemes in education is paying off. But it is encountering steady resistance from the public education establishment and its supporting teachers’ unions. Actions, reactions, strategies, and the unfolding political struggle between these adversaries are the subjects of this brief overview of this topic.

The ``R's of School Reform'' and the Politics of Reforming or Replacing Public Schools

Pressures to reform or replace public schools have flowed from a variety of social trends interacting with a growing perception that the schools are performing poorly or are inadequate for the demands of the new global economy they now face. Since the 1980s, many reforms have been attempted, but with little evidence of real improvement, especially in the education of poor and disadvantaged children. As a result, support is growing, at the very least in elite circles, for more radical reforms that would dramatically alter or even privatize public education. Public educators increasingly recognize the threats they face, but have trouble seizing upon the opportunities these threats present because they challenge fundamental aspects of the paradigm and ideology of public education to which they are wedded. This paper focuses on competing views of the policy problems and possible solutions public educators face in this situation, with particular reference to the experience of school reform efforts in the United States.

Environmental Pressures, Management Imperatives, and Competing Paradigms in Educational Administration

Across much of the westernized world, environmental pressures have transformed the context of public education and educational administration. The changing world economy, declining confidence in the welfare state, and adverse social trends have generated strong pressures for change in education systems, and for nothing less than a paradigm shift in educational management. Together, these social forces have produced three interconnected imperatives for educational administrators: a productivity imperative, an accountability imperative, and a community imperative. Efforts to respond to these imperatives generate tensions between competing paradigms in educational management. This article discusses the environmental pressures, the resulting three imperatives, and the tensions flowing from these developments.

The Political Economy of Public Schools.

Both the current decline in support for the public schools and the organizational-performance problems of schools can be illuminated by the conceptual approach of political economy. This article combines a selective review of the literature with an introduction to this increasingly popular mode of analysis.