10 School decentralization and empowerment

School results for children of poverty ‐ those forced by that poverty to live in inner‐city neighbourhoods ‐generally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's business‐industrial‐political complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and self‐esteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socio‐economic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance ‐ an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served ‐ has gained momentum and exists in some form in most large‐city school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.     

Pupil profiling: some policy issues from school‐based practice∗

Theoretical writings on policy analysis have often dealt with the problem of adjudicating value issues as well as the problem of complexity. Since both these problems are ultimately epistemological in character, this paper explores their structure from a less familiar non‐foundational, coherentist epistemological framework, within the context of the synoptic/anti‐synoptic debate in policy analaysis. The paper argues against a sharp distinction between fact and value in policy choice, and recommends the gradual replacement of ubiquitous folk psychological simplifying assumptions in favour of scientific ones, where predictions systematically lapse, as a step towards dealing with complexity.     

Identifying and developing creative giftedness

To a large extent, creativity is a decision. Children as well as adults are creative, not by virtue of an innate ability, but by virtue of a set of decisions. In essence, they decide for creativity, rather than an innate set of abilities deciding whether they are creative. Thus, creative giftedness is not a fixed trait, but a decision‐making skill that can be developed. In this article, I present ten decisions people can make to decide for creativity. Included are teaching examples of these decisions as well as teaching activities to facilitate students' learning how to make these decisions.     

The developing educator: from novice to expert in Agricultural Education

Summary

The paper raises questions about how inexperienced lecturers (whether initially trained or untrained) develop a mastery of skills within their chosen profession. To do this, an analysis of what constitutes ‘mastery’ is needed. This is borrowed from the work of Schon (1983 and 1987) on the reflective practitioner, and of the Dreyfus brothers (1986) on human intuition and expertise. The paper next reports the results and tentative conclusions of a small-scale study in May–June 1996 of how long it has taken for 20 agricultural educators in six British Colleges of Agriculture to have developed their skills from their teaching experience, and their perceptions of the influences which have facilitated or inhibited that process.     

Examining the rationale for gifted education

The rationales underlying the enrichment and acceleration approaches to programming for the gifted are analyzed and compared. The focus is on how each approach views questions concerning who are the gifted and how they are best educated. Acceleration emphasizes development of specific cognitive abilities while enrichment is aimed at helping students with certain personality characteristics to organize their abilities into constructive and creative products. The Revolving Door Identification Model debate aired in an earlier issue of this journal is used to illustrate the differences that exist between proponents of enrichment and acceleration programming models.     

Evaluating students' science notebooks as an assessment tool

The idea of using science notebooks as a classroom assessment tool is not new. There is general agreement that science notebooks allow teachers to assess students' conceptual and procedural understanding and to provide the feedback students need for improving their performance. In this study we examined the use of science notebooks as an unobtrusive assessment tool that can also be used by individuals outside the classroom (for example, school district personnel), and as a means for obtaining information about students' learning and their opportunities to learn. More specifically, in this study students' science notebooks were used as a source of data about the (a) implementation of a curriculum's intended activities, (b) students' performance, and (c) quality of teachers' feedback. Our results indicated that: (1) Students' science notebooks can be reliably scored. Unit implementation, student performance, and teacher feedback scores were highly consistent across raters and units. (2) High and positive correlations with other performance assessment scores indicated that the student performance score can be considered as an achievement indicator. And (3) low performance scores across the two units revealed that students' communication skills and understanding were far away from the maximum score and did not improve over the course of instruction during the school year. This result may be due, in part, to the fact that no teacher feedback was found in any of the students' notebooks across the six classrooms studied. This may reflect some characteristics of the teachers' assessment practices that may require further professional development.