America is again in a period of intense education reform designed to improve teaching and learning. Since 1983, when America was declared "at risk" highly publicized and widely disseminated reports criticized the state of the nation's schools and suggested global remedies for perceived weaknesses. Such generalized calls for education reforms initiated by those outside the individual school historically failed to significantly alter the learning environment and effect improvement. A growing body of research suggests legislated reform efforts do not succeed because they do not recognize the unique character of each school. Further, research findings relative to the change process itself is consistently ignored by outside-the-school policymakers. A crucial step toward education renewal at the local school level is the identification of improvement priorities. The purpose of this study was to investigate practices and perceptions of the improvement priority determination process in the local school. Three research objectives guided the study: (1) To describe priorities identified by teachers and principals to bring about improvement; (2) To describe how teachers and principals determine priorities for improvement; (3) To describe the degree of teacher satisfaction towards the process for determining priorities for school improvement. Data was obtained from principals and teachers in the eleven core schools of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst school/university partnership, the Coalition for School Improvement. Analysis of findings for the first objective indicate that less than half (44%) of principal-identified priorities and only 10% of teacher-identified priorities were stated in terms of student learning. Analysis of findings for the second objective indicate general congruence between principal and teacher perceptions of procedures employed to establish priorities but that principals felt teachers had greater involvement in determining priorities than did the teachers. Findings for the third objective indicate teachers were satisfied with their degree of involvement in establishing improvement priorities although they expressed a higher degree of satisfaction with their role in initiating priorities than they did regarding their role in determining priorities. The determination of priorities to address learning problems of students is an immediate step that can be taken to make schools even more adequate to their tasks of preparing children and youth for constructive participation in their democracy. The tendency of educators to describe goals in terms of the program rather than in terms of the learner suggests that concerns for the means has relegated concern for the learner to a lesser place in the hierarchy of school renewal priorities.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7844 |
| Date | 01 January 1990 |
| Creators | Klein, Ann G |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
Page generated in 0.0022 seconds