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The purpose of this study was to contribute to an understanding of the milieu in which higher education policy is formed in the United States, using the Commonwealth of Virginia as a case study seeking to explain the image and saga of its State Council of Higher Education. Virginia is an appropriate state upon which to focus because it is taking its place among the leading states in public higher education.;Although control of higher education policy now resides largely in the states and their statewide coordinating councils and governing boards, there is not a clear identity of any state's presence. This study was an attempt to determine if such an identity exists, and, if so, to describe it using a distinctive approach to the recent history of American higher education.;Papers, policy and position statements, documents and Council minutes of State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) from 1977 to 1987 were studied. Interviews were conducted with persons involved in higher education in the Commonwealth 1977 to 1987. to evaluate legislative opinion about SCHEV, a questionnaire was mailed to each member of the 1988-89 General Assembly and responses compared with those from a similar 1976 survey. Newspaper reports and news releases were analyzed.;It was hypothesized that the concept of organizational saga which Burton Clark developed to explain campus image and evolution is useful as a method of analyzing and describing a statewide coordinating council of higher education.;It was concluded that the Clark's concept of organizational saga fits the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. as the story unfolded, it showed a formal organization with its own legend, with its own set of beliefs, and with pride in itself for major accomplishments in improving the state's system of higher education.;Further study is recommended on the appointment process by which lay persons fill positions on the higher education bodies, on measuring the effectiveness of statewide coordinating boards and the influence of their executive officers, on the construction of target budgets of the state system of higher education, and on the relationship between the State Council and the General Assembly.

The purpose of this study was to investigate current evaluation practices in Virginia and to assess the impact of public school evaluation upon teachers of music. Traditional methods for the evaluation of teachers appear to have limited applicability for the majority of elementary and secondary school educators engaged in the field of performing arts, due primarily to the specialized nature of their respective teaching disciplines. Educational administrators charged with the responsibility for evaluating personnel confront an additional challenge when compelled to apply general models that are not suited to the highly complex world of performing arts instruction. Music teachers and school divisions in Virginia served as sources of data for this descriptive study.;In order for educators to make informed evaluation decisions, comprehensive information about the contributions of music and other fine and performing arts personnel will need to be considered. New evaluation models emerging in recent years may hold the key for a more inclusive view of teaching performance in the arts. This study explored the use of current evaluation models in the context of music education and addressed the need for more reliable approaches to the evaluation of music teachers.

Full-time community college faculty moonlight to a much greater extent than does the general workforce. The number of faculty who work second jobs outside of their full-time teaching contract can be projected to exceed 40 percent with a strong possibility that more than half have employment outside of their primary faculty jobs. Chief community college administrators do not believe--or are not willing to admit--that their full-time faculty are so engaged in outside employment.;When faced with years of the same teaching assignments, heavy teaching and advising workloads but limited opportunities and resources for professional growth and renewal, veteran community college faculty become weary and unchallenged. They turn outside of their institutions to revitalize their career plateaus. When institutions fail to recognize or know how faculty respond when they feel "stuck" in their jobs, they jeopardize their greatest resource. Once "lost" to outside employment ventures, faculty become institutionally disengaged.

The purpose of this study was to clarify the structure of information systems employed by trustees in higher education and to evaluate the relationships of these systems to decision-making. Communication and organizational theories characterizing the role of informal and formal information used by policy makers and top management in organizational decision-making provided the framework for this study. Studies of top-level corporate executives (Adams 1975; Quinn 1980; Jones and McLeod 1986) revealed executives' strong preferences for and substantial use of information from informal channels for planning and decision-making. These theories were integrated with the research of Ingram (1980) and Schmidtlein (1977) concerning information source use by trustees in higher education governance.;Trustees from a small public college and a small private college comprised the sample for this study. The 25 trustees who participated in the research had served at least one academic year on their respective college boards. A biographical questionnaire requesting certain demographic data was given to the study participants. Individual interviews asking the trustees to specify the sources of information they use when making decisions for their institution were conducted.;Frequencies and percentages were calculated to identify distinctive patterns of informal and formal information source use by trustees. Results illustrate similar preferences and use of informal information in decision-making by the trustees and senior executives. The study's findings verify that informal information plays an important role in the decision processes of trustees in higher education. Notable differences in information source use were identified among trustees from the public college and the private college.;Further systematic study and development of a theory describing the role of informal information in decision processes of trustees is needed in order to fully explain all aspects of trusteeship and governance of colleges and universities.

The purpose of this study was to investigate role perceptions of elected and appointed school board members and their superintendents in Virginia to determine if increased citizen participation and cultural change had affected the process of school governance. Four policy issue areas provided the context for revealing role perceptions: Administration and Organization, Business and Financial Management, Employee and Pupil Personnel Services, and Curriculum and Instruction. A 27-item survey was sent to superintendents and school board members of 64 school divisions, 31 of which had appointed boards and 33 of which had elected boards. Eighty-four percent of the superintendents and 61% of the board members responded.;Two-by-two analysis of variance indicated statistically significant differences by board type and position for Administration and Organization and statistically significant differences by board type for Curriculum and Instruction. Although the differences were not found to be meaningful, the survey data revealed a trend in all issue areas except Curriculum and Instruction in which elected school board members perceive their role as "equally responsible." Responses for all groups for all policy issue areas clustered between "equally responsible" and "superintendent primarily responsible.".;Confirming interviews revealed that appointed and elected board members are very active in school governance in the area of Administration and Organization. Superintendents of both board types engaged in pre-decisional social processes to control the systemic agenda. Sociopolitical models of agenda setting and negotiation and exchange explained the interactions. Superintendents have adopted a political-professional model to cope with school board members' increased needs for information and involvement.;It was concluded that finance and personnel issues had no significant differences, unlike findings in other states, because of school funding processes in Virginia which deny school boards the authority to tax. Superintendents perceive Curriculum and Instruction closer to "equally responsible" than their boards do. Further study is recommended when elected school boards become more mature.

The purpose of this study was to investigate teacher sense of efficacy and its relationship to pupil control ideology in urban middle schools. The following questions were investigated: (1) Among urban middle school teachers, what is the relationship between their level of self-efficacy for teaching and their pupil control ideology? (2) Are female middle school teachers more or less efficacious than male middle school teachers? (3) Are female middle school teachers more or less humanistic than male middle school teachers?;The study included middle school teachers from 4 urban school divisions in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Teachers from 13 middle schools from the 4 school divisions participated in this study which yielded a total of 161 teachers.;A Pearson r correlation was run to investigate the relationship between teacher sense of efficacy and pupil control ideology. T-tests were run to determine if statistically significant difference existed between the pupil control ideology and teacher sense of efficacy scores of urban male and female middle school teachers. The results of the Pearson r correlation indicated that there was no statistically significant relationship between teachers' sense of efficacy and their pupil control ideology. The t-test results indicated that urban female middle school teachers were more efficacious than urban male middle school teachers. There was no statistically significant difference between the pupil control ideology mean scores of urban middle school teachers.;This study has implications for schools to provide staff development for urban male teachers to increase their sense of efficacy. A replication of this study using a larger sample and a different measure of pupil control ideology may yield different results.

The purpose of this study was to identify the current stated purposes of Christian schools and the reasons parents give for choosing to send their children to these schools. The methodology was essentially a comparative analysis of multiple sources. Documents from the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI), the professional literature, and the sample schools were analyzed. Administrators and parents from selected Christian schools were interviewed and their statements were also analyzed.;Comparative analysis was used to reduce the coded statements Categories that child/student environment, and to emergent themes and then to common categories emerged were: (1) faith/spiritual development, (2) development, (3) home/family, (4) school academic (5) school non-academic environment. Comparisons were made across the categories to determine agreement or non-agreement.;The results of this study were consistent with earlier findings in the professional literature. New to this study were questions referencing possible legislation to return school sponsored prayer and Bible reading to public schools.

The focus of the ninth grade year as a crucial year for high school students is a current issue that raises national concern. Currently, rural and suburban school districts have been successful in implementing and in sustaining successful ninth grade transition programs. However, in urban settings, educators have been perplexed by the varying degrees of success with these same strategies. This study focused on four urban high schools' efforts to increase ninth grade promotion rates and ultimately high school completion rates. Each school's efforts have been described in order to gain insight into how each program was developed to meet the needs of its school population. The planning, implementation, program design, inhibiting factors, facilitative factors, and criteria used to determine success/failure were explored in each school, and findings for each school were compared to practices found in other ninth grade transition programs in urban settings across the United States. Findings from this study suggest that while ninth grade transition programs can positively impact ninth grade promotion rates, urban schools continue to fall short in yielding immediate and continued increases in promotion rates. Before the strategies can be systematically labeled effective, each school's efforts have to result in increases in ninth grade promotion rates that are replicated on a yearly basis.