The purpose of this study was to determine if the experience and qualifications of teachers in reduced-size classes, resulting from California's Class Size Reduction Program, varied across schools and if so, to identify school characteristics that are associated with that variation. The results indicate that teachers irt I educed-size classes are less experienced and less qualified and suggest that schools with higher percentages of Hispanic students have reduced-size class teachers with less overall teaching experience and less experience in their current districts. The study also revealed that district characteristics are strongly associated with the experience and credential status of teachers in reduced-size classes. This study although exploratory, has implications for future research and suggests the need to train teachers in reduced-size classes and to enact policies to equalize a valuable resource-experienced and qualified teachers-across districts and schools.

This study applies Hirschman's concepts of satisfaction, voice, and valuing product quality to study parents' attitudes toward three forms of school choice: intradistrict options, interdistrict transfers, and public/private school vouchers. Findings reveal three different patterns: Parents who are more likely to participate in intradistrict options have more opportunities to express voice and invest more in educational quality. Parents who are more likely to use vouchers also have more opportunities to exercise voice and invest in educational quality, but they are also less satisfied And parents who are more likely to seek interdistict transfers are simply less satisfied with their children's schools.

In this article, leadership is conceptualized as an organizational quality Adopting a perspective on organizations offered by institutional theory, the authors offer a view of leadership that builds on the following points: Leadership flows through the networks of roles that comprise organizations. The medium of leadership and the currency of leadership lie In the personal resources of people. And, leadership shapes the systems that produce patterns of interaction and the meanings that other participants attach to organizational events.

This article reports the results of a study guided by a conceptualization of leadership as an organizational quality. The study examines the relationship between the leadership exerted by principals, teachers, secretaries, and parents; four functions of effective organizations; and several measures of school effectiveness. The results of path analyses revealed the following: The total amount of leadership in schools was associated with two organizational functions, which in turn were associated with four measures of school performance. The leadership of principals and the leadership of groups of teachers were positively related to organizational latency, or commitment, which was positively associated with the perceived effectiveness of schools and negatively associated with teacher turnover Finally, the leadership of parents was positively associated with student achievement, whereas the influence of secretaries was negatively associated with student achievement.

This study describes an aspect of school-based management that previously has been ignored. Drawing on concepts from an institutional theory of organizations, this study describes the actors who shaped and promoted school-based management in the national arena, their interests, and the network that linked them. Three categories of actors are identified: policy actors, teachers union actors, and academic actors. The most prominent actors were often organizations rather than individuals. The actors shared two overarching goals: to improve the effectiveness of public schools and enhance the professional status of teachers. The actors were linked by an informal network; that is, they were loosely organized. These and other findings suggest that school-based management was at least partially the product of the institutional environment in which schools and school districts operated.

In this article, the authors describe four prominent forms of parental choice that have been proposed as broad policy tools to improve education, identify assumptions underlying these initiatives, and review the findings of research that bear on these assumptions. Although the evidence is generally incomplete and inconclusive, it sheds more light on the type of parents who are most likely to exercise choice: They tend to be better educated and already involved in their children's education. The general lack of evidence leads us to two observations: (a) the current debate over choice may center less on the question of its ability to improve education and more on the question of whose interests are served by education, and (b)the failure of researchers to examine nonchoosing parents may have eliminated an important perspective from the discussion on choice as an educational policy tool.

In article, we proposed a for engendering in reviews of what we ultimately, albeit reluctantly, termed multivocal1 literatures. Because our purpose in proposing the method was to direct attention to and stimulate discussion of rigor in reviews of these literatures, we genuinely appreciate the thoughtful, diverse, and provocative reactions contained in the Elmore, Patton, and Yin commentaries. Because the commentaries offer contrasting assessments of proposal and emphasize different sets of issues, we summarize the central thesis of and respond to some of the major issues raised in each commentary.

This article presents the findings of a study that examined how an elementary school faculty made sense of the succession of its principal. The findings suggest that teachers' sense-making was affected by two sets of factors previously identified by research in noneducational settings: a group norm and characteristics of the succession process. The findings also suggest that a general expectation of change and presuccession sense-making affected the manner in which teachers interpreted succession events. The findings of this study suggest several questions to guide future research.

The purposes of this study were to describe how an elementary school made sense of the impending succession of its principal and to extend Gephart's attempt to derive a grounded theory of leader succession. Gephart found that the faculty collectively degraded the status of the departing principal. In contrast, we found patterns that characterized teachers' individual thinking about the impending succession. We describe possible explanations for the discrepancy and discuss an alternative that focuses on norms rooted outside of the school. We describe a number of questions raised by the findings thatfuture research might address.

The purpose of this article is to theoretically examine the loose coupling that has been observed to exist between teachers and administrators. Using Weick's concept of organizing, it is argued that teacher and administrator roles are elements of the information processing repertoires of educational organizations. As such, they must remain sufficiently independent in order to process those inputs for which each is particularly well suited. This conceptualization is grounded in thefindings of a variety of studies on schooling, teaching, and educational administration.

Two dimensions of the leadership of educational organizations are explored: (1) the day to day behavior of superintendents and (2) the meanings superintendents attach to their work. The work stems from related studies by the authors. Two clusters of patterns emerged from this analysis. First, superintending is communicating. Second, superintendents are constrained by social and organizational structures and, yet, control a major part of their day-to-day work and exert an important organizational influence. Questions are raised concerning the adequacy of the dominant notions about leadership.