This study was designed to formulate categories that reflect pupil personnel service providers' and administrators' views of elements associated with effective multicultural perspectives of pupil personnel services and how they rate the importance of these elements. A review of the literature examined how school reform, effective schools, school culture, and multiculturalism have influenced the provision of services by Pupil Personnel Services to a growing culturally diverse population over the last 20 years. Q-Sort was the qualitative methodology used with these professionals from within pupil personnel services. A total of 32 respondents representing five specific professional positions found in most public school environments. The results of the Q-Sort were analyzed from the combined data from all subjects. A similarity matrix was computed and frequencies of co-occurrence were determined for all pairs of items. This provided for the correlation of each person with every other person and, through factor analysis, the number of different Q-Sorts is known and the degree to which there is a high correlation among them or not. In addition, individual participants' matrices were subjected to two-dimensional non-metric scaling. In addition, MultiDimensional Scaling (MDS) was applied to the data to further analyze the categorization process. Lastly, a rank ordering of items provided a rating of items from most important to least important. This last activity provided an overall ranking of the items across all participants and allowed for a comparison of the importance of these statements. As a result of cluster analysis, all items grouped at higher levels of significance agreed with the way the items were placed in categories that the author had established. However, MDS results indicated that the basis for coexistence of items was different from that which the author had used. An examination of a multidimensional configuration of the raters, using a weirdness index table, found school psychologists and administrators differed the most from the average of all of the five groups. Factor analysis and a similarity matrix of the ratings by individuals and groups indicated that there may not be a significant difference between them.

The American educational system has come under fire in the last several years. At the national level, new laws have been enacted which have helped fund innovative educational programs. Consequently, the individual states have responded with sweeping educational reform laws to revamp their educational systems and improve student learning. In 1992–93, in an effort to improve education and the preparation of teachers, Massachusetts opted to review and examine teacher education programs. Upon the review of these programs and the students' scores in standardized tests, Massachusetts created and passed legislation for educational reform. The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 (MERA) was passed and new standards were developed for the education of students, the preparation of teachers, and the roles played by the schools, the administrators, and all of the other personnel within the public school system. This study addresses the edicts of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 that deal with the recertification of teachers and their professional development. For this study, the Delphi method was used to gain a perspective on developing standards to assess quality of professional development programs as they are presently delivered. The results have been subjected to a factor analysis that yielded four factors: Impact of Professional Development Programs in Teaching; Evaluation and Follow-up of Professional Development Programs; Worth/Accountability of Professional Development Programs; and Motivators for Effective Professional Development Programs. These factors should be considered when assessing quality of professional development programs.

As the financial health of institutions of higher education become uncertain, a need exists to assess an institution's short and long-term viability. The purpose of this study is to determine whether a model developed by Leslie and Fretwell (1996) could have predicted the fiscal health for a public institution of higher education. The model includes factors that should be used in determining fiscal health. They include the following: (1) the effects of economic, demographic, and political trends; (2) trends in the institution's financial condition; (3) stability, openness, and courage in management; (4) vitality of education programs; and (5) the interaction of all of these factors. This case study focused on two 5-year periods at the flagship campus of a northeast public university system. The audited financial statements of the campus were used to determine the accuracy of the model. This college was selected because it had experienced both a financial decline and revival within a 10-year period. Through a review of related documents, a questionnaire, and interviews, the model was constructed and analyzed. A total of 18 independent variables were constructed to represent the four factors. The analytical framework was based upon causal path analysis. Even though this study was admittedly exploratory, the findings revealed that the Leslie and Fretwell (1996) model is a useful management tool and could provide meaningful information for administrators and trustees in planning and decision-making. Conclusions drawn from the research suggest that 7 of the 18 variables could assist in predicting the fiscal health of the campus in this study regardless of whether the fiscal condition declined or improved. The variables were divided into three types: (1) leading, (2) coincident, and (3) lagging. The leading indicators that could be useful in predicting fiscal health are (1) share of state appropriation, (2) SAT scores, (3) enrollment, (4) applicant yield and (5) senior staff turnover rate. The single coincident indicator was the state appropriation. Finally, the only lagging indicator that could have predicted fiscal health for the campus in this study was deferred maintenance. The limitations and implications of this study as well as recommendations for further research have also been provided.

Warnings of an impending leadership crisis in community colleges are raising interest in the role of chief academic officer (CAO). Despite the centrality of the position, the CAO is largely neglected in the academic research literature. Information from CAOs about their perceptions and experiences as leaders is needed to create and develop supports for their expanding leadership role. Factors that affect collaboration among CAOs must be identified to determine the extent to which CAOs are interested and able to collaborate to solve common problems. This qualitative study ultimately probes the potential benefit of developing a network of chief academic officers in community colleges to confront and resolve shared challenges and opportunities, particularly at the regional level. CAOs serving in 40 public community colleges in the six New England states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont were sent an original written survey probing their views of CAO leadership, collaboration and demographic characteristics. Twenty-five surveys were completed and returned for a response rate of 62.5%. Five CAOs, selected by geography, size of institution, and views on collaboration were selected for hour-long interviews to explore in depth their survey answers. The study findings indicate that the CAO is a critical leadership role in New England community colleges faced with expanding demands and shrinking resources. CAOs are also active collaborators who value the knowledge and experience of their peers in formulating responses to common problems. A model of collaboration as a function of engagement and concerns is used to clarify collaboration among CAOs. The model suggests that collaboration reaches its full potential when engagement between CAOs becomes more personal and there is recognition of mutual concerns. Collaboration among CAOs could be facilitated by providing additional time and resources to support communication and travel. A higher percentage of CAOs in New England are female, white, slightly older, and have served, on average, fewer years in their position when compared with national studies. Recommendations for supporting collaboration among CAOs, especially within geographic regions, are presented, along with a call for more research on the role of the CAO in community colleges.

To be able to connect the school counseling program to standards-based reform, school counseling initiatives such as The Education Trust's Transforming the School Counseling Initiative and The American School Counseling Association (ASCA) have called for a paradigm shift in the understanding of the school counselor's role, from a service provider to a key player in the success of all students. Consequently, emphasis on advocacy, leadership, teamwork and collaboration, accountability, use of data and systemic change infuses the school counseling literature. As a result of these efforts, a new understanding of school counseling has emerged and leadership is considered to be at the core of the other essential roles of the counselors. Even though school counselors' leadership is a hot topic, studies that holistically examine the leadership practice of school counselors are absent from the school counseling literature. The goal of this paper is to investigate how school counselors play a part in the overall school leadership practice for system-wide improvement. The distributed leadership framework was chosen as an analytical framework to analyze the leadership practices of the school counselors. This paper offers the idea that distributed leadership is a useful tool to understand school counselors' effort on school improvement holistically because this framework calls the unit of analysis not with individual leaders, but their interactions. Briefly, in this study leadership practice is the core unit of analysis in trying to understand school leadership from a distributed perspective. The qualitative research methodology chosen for this study is ethnography and this ethnographic study conducted in Mid West in a high school setting. The data were analyzed with the line-by-line coding technique. The findings indicated that the school counselors at the research site made important systemic changes. These changes mostly happened as a result of the counselors' personal willingness to be part of the leadership in the school. However, the institutionalized opportunities for counselors to lead were limited therefore many changes stayed at the idiosyncratic level and the counselors often relied on their informal working relationships to shape the leadership practice. This paper concluded that a school counselor needs to work in an integrated situation with distributed leadership to be able to create system-wide change and there is a need to ensure institutionalization of school counselor leader roles. The findings of this dissertation study provide some implications for the school principals, school counselors in practice, and those who educate and train school counselors. Principals can provide some opportunities for counselors to engage in formally-constituted multidisciplinary leadership teams. School counselors can think about the ways of being an active participant in school leadership and can learn more about the nature of organizational change. In addition to that they need to raise other school members' awareness about the counselors' appropriate functions and to seriously consider the other school members' perceptions. Graduate programs need to teach students the concept of leadership and organizational change.

Major decisions for public universities are often shaped by the political dynamics which function continuously inside the institution and within the larger external community. A persistent problem in the study of higher education is the need to better understand this complex external environment and to build adequate consideration of it into the planning and decision making process. This study examined a particular instance of planning and decision making for an urban public university; the site selection process for the Boston campus of The University of Massachusetts. It identified the major components and dynamics of this prolonged search and developed recommendations which can be generalized to similar institutions. Study methods included review of University archives and contemporary news media, interviews, and review of public records. The researcher first sought to describe the broader context in which Massachusetts public higher education developed during the decades prior to the sudden decision to create a Boston campus for the University of Massachusetts in 1964. Then a chronology was constructed describing major events and decisions reached during the site selection process. A particular effort was made to determine the nature and methodology of the University's planning process. The study then examined the internal organizational structure and political environment within the university and the broader political and economic environment in the external community in order to assess their impact on the final outcome. A key finding was that the immediate local political and economic context surrounding an urban public university will have a profound impact upon policy decision making for the university. Since the near neighbors of such an institution will tend to view its presence in terms of its immediate impact on their daily lives and not in terms of its broader long term benefit to society, this local context must be known and understood by the university's decision makers. Lack of adequate state-wide coordination of the development of public higher education in Massachusetts during the 1960's and the lack of an adequate public relations effort on the part of the University were major contributing factors which hampered the site selection process.

Research has indicated that the first year of college is more stressful for the college student than the three remaining years. A descriptive, exploratory study was conducted which assessed the general freshman population of a large public university in Puerto Rico, a Spanish-speaking country. Freshmen (N = 1665) completed, in the Fall of 1993, a 73-item survey which collected data on demographics, academic and financial backgrounds, employment patterns, and academic, career, and personal needs. Students were asked to rate the intensity of the needs they were experiencing as they entered the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus. Results indicated that participants, as a group, rated academic-career related items stronger than personal items. In general terms, higher need levels were associated also with specific sub-populations of freshmen: females, students coming from public schools in Puerto Rico, and students enrolled in the Colleges of Business Administration, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences. The findings of this study are valuable for planning college counseling services at the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras Campus and for clarifying student development theory. The identification of these needs should enable administrators, orientation planners, counselors, and policy makers of this University to design programs to better meet the academic, career, and personal needs of the freshman population as well as the individualized needs of specifically designated subgroups of incoming freshmen. The planning of such interventions must be followed by systematic evaluation of the effects of the programs that are developed.

The purpose of this study was to explore: (a) how and to what extent teachers experience and express trust in relation to individual students and groups of students; (b) how and to what extent teachers value and focus on specific attributes of trust over others; and (c) how and to what extent the levels of teacher trust in students and the various attributes of trust impact the teachers’ behaviors and choices in the classroom. Data were collected from teacher interviews, teacher questionnaires, classroom and school artifacts, and descriptive field notes from observations. Data were analyzed using content analysis and open, axial, and selective coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Results indicated that participants valued specific attributes of trust over other attributes of trust. Participants were aware that individual students expressed different levels of one or more attributes of trust and made specific behavioral and pedagogical decisions for students who demonstrated very low levels or very high levels of specific attributes of trust. Results also indicated that participants valued particular attributes of trust because those attributes facilitated and reinforced other attributes of trust. One attribute of trust could be facilitated and reinforced by several other attributes of trust. Participants used pedagogical and behavioral means to attempt to increase students’ expression of particular attributes of trust. Results suggested that teachers who adjust the classroom environment and use several alternative teaching strategies may be making choices that increase students’ abilities to demonstrate attributes of trust. Teachers who use fewer teaching strategies and who do not adjust the environment adequately may be less able to increase the students’ abilities to demonstrate attributes of trust. A clear understanding of teacher-student trust may help teachers to chart the degree to which particular teaching methods and behavioral practices work or do not work to increase attributes of trust.

The local school is the level at which school improvement occurs. The key leaders of the local schools are the principals and they should be involved in improving the curriculum for school improvement. However, principals encounter difficulties. Their role is unclear. They do not possess the necessary skills. To acquire such skills, staff development programs are needed for principals. In this exploratory study, a staff development program was designed and implemented to assist principals to gain curriculum development competencies. A list of fifty-four activities was mailed to eighty-eight Pennsylvania principals to collect their perceptions on the role of the elementary principal in curriculum development. Seventy returned questionnaires were analyzed and the activity identified as most important to their role in curriculum leadership was evaluating classroom instruction. A review of literature was made to determine premises, competencies, and learning conditions to be included in a staff development program. Eight premises were used to construct eight lessons with twenty-four objectives. Seventeen principals completed a needs assessment and pretest to determine competencies they already had and those needing development. Principals participated in workshop sessions to correct weaknesses. After the sessions, principals completed a posttest to determine if they gained the desired competencies, and which aspects of the staff development program were most helpful. The analysis of the posttest data revealed that principals perceived the staff development program to have assisted them in gaining twenty-one objectives. Two objectives were not accomplished with the principals and, therefore, recommendations have been suggested on how to revise the lesson. One objective was previously obtained by all principals who participated in the lesson. Therefore, this objective needs to be evaluated with other principals to determine if it should be deleted or maintained. It was determined, then, that the staff development program benefitted selected principals in gaining curriculum development skills. A recommendation for future study is that this program be implemented with a larger group of elementary principals to determine if it assists them to gain crucial curriculum development skills in a significant and lasting manner.

Effective curriculum planning and decision making process is key to the success of educational programs. The problem with centralized educational systems is that, at the curriculum planning level, the system does not have sufficient data about the needs of the learner, teachers, and the expectations of the society at large for effective curriculum planning to take place. At the implementation level, the system does not give teachers the needed flexibility to implement the curriculum. The major purpose of this study was to investigate curriculum decision making process in Malawi. The research procedures used in this study consisted of systematic document analysis and interviews with selected educators. In addition, a survey of opinions of students, parents, teachers, and heads of schools was conducted. The findings of the study confirmed that the curriculum planning and decision making process in Malawi is centralized. It also found that curriculum planning and development process for the secondary school curriculum was not fully systematised. At the school level, heads of schools and teachers had very little say about the curriculum. The implementation of the curriculum was, therefore, not flexible enough to allow the curriculum to be modified to suit local conditions while at the same time meeting the nationally developed objectives. The following were some of the recommendations the study made: (1) Decisions about the curriculum should be broadly based. (2) The responsibility for national curriculum development should be vested in the hands of the Malawi Institute of Education. (3) The Ministry of Education and Culture should gradually institute a school-based management strategy in order to improve the effectiveness of schools. (4) Lines of communication between the school and the Ministry headquarters should be improved. (5) In order to encourage the application of knowledge and skills into practice, there is need to continue refining performance based assessment techniques for appraising student performance and for placement. It is hoped that the decentralization process now taking place within the education sector, will take into consideration the above recommendations in order to improve the quality of secondary education in Malawi.