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Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district leaders also said their educators had received verbal or written threats about politically controversial topics since fall 2021. The findings come from surveys issued to 300 district and charter network leaders and interviews with superintendents. Their responses shed light on how political polarization has affected classrooms and how districts are responding. This report presents results from the fall 2022 survey of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and CRPE. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and Kitamba, to help improve outcomes for students throughout the United States.

Public education depends on expertise, work, money, and cooperation from multiple actors who have different interests and beliefs. These lead to competition and negotiation--in other words, politics. Failure to consider the politics of reform implementation and sustainability has doomed many promising K-12 school improvement initiatives. This paper analyzes more than 10 years of data on the implementation of the portfolio strategy to identify practical lessons on managing the politics of reform K-12 schools. Sustaining complex reforms like the portfolio strategy in a political environment requires leaders to: (1) Continually seek new supporters and renew the support of existing ones; (2) Expect and prepare for attacks and be alert to the unnecessary harms caused by their own actions, which bolster opposition; (3) Develop information strategies that document intermediate results, alert leaders to emergent problems and actively counter hostile narratives; (4) Be attentive to competing agendas and political liabilities within their own alliances; and (5) Prepare for leadership succession so that reforms have a chance to last long enough to make a difference. These observations challenge the conventional wisdom that sustainable reforms can be built only upon the percolating up of good ideas and initiatives from below. Reform leaders are essential to knitting together fragile coalitions who may be motivated by different goals and aligning new programs and initiatives--and politically reinforcing them over time--so their benefits can accumulate.

This is Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)'s second consensus panel report on the pandemic and delays in students' learning. Based on the evidence available a year ago, CRPE reported the average K-12 student in America mastered less academic content due to the pandemic and associated disruptions to schooling. Negative impacts were generally larger in math than in reading, substantial across all grade levels, larger where students had less access to in-person instruction, and larger for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. This year's report, based on 23 studies published since last July, offers even stronger evidence of the pandemic's negative consequences for student growth and development. The pauses to in-person schooling and related changes in family and community life over the past year continued to interrupt most children's academic growth, but the consequences are not evenly distributed. Children whose schools were closed the longest had their learning interrupted the most--and most often, that affected low-income children and children of color in big cities. In 2022 as in 2021, the authors aim to present a coherent baseline of what is known, unknown, and needs to be known at this stage of the pandemic--and the beginning of a recovery from the pandemic. These reports are designed to help system leaders, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, philanthropies, the media, and others to define ambitious goals and clear metrics that ensure our education system meets every student's needs over the coming years. [This report is an update to "How Much Have Students Missed Academically Because of the Pandemic? A Review of the Evidence to Date" (ED614130).]

The current debate about charter schools' effects on school district finances hinges on enrollment loss. Critics claim that the surge in charter enrollment in California since 2000 has driven enrollment loss statewide--cutting districts' income more than their costs, especially in cities where many students attend charter schools. State officials are under pressure to cap the growth of charter schools as a way of stabilizing district enrollments, and thus finances. This brief examines state and district data on district and charter school enrollment trends over the past 10 years. We pay particular attention to Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego, where claims of harm done by charter enrollment growth have been made most often. The brief makes three points: (1) Surges and declines in K-12 enrollment have long been a fact of life in California districts. Statewide numbers of school-age children are currently falling and will continue to do so; (2) The growth of charter schools cannot account for all of the enrollment loss experienced by urban school districts; and (3) Charter school enrollment is not currently a major factor in continued district enrollment decline. [To view "Do Charter Schools Cause Fiscal Distress in School Districts?" see ED595169 and "Do the Costs of California Charter Schools Outweigh the Benefits?" see ED595193.]

Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. If all goes well, education is headed in the same direction. Personalized learning and globally benchmarked academic standards (a.k.a. Common Core) are the focus of most major school districts and charter school networks. Educators and parents know students must be better prepared to think deeply about complex problems and to have skills that are relevant for jobs that haven't yet been created. Promising school models are showing what's possible, but innovation in the classroom only takes you so far. Twenty-first century learning practices demand twenty-first century systems. This paper goes deep into the question of which system policies are most likely to get in the way of implementing personalized learning at scale. We work outward from the school to define the new capacities and functions districts need to develop. We make the case that districts are currently unwittingly hostile to school-level innovation. For that to change, they must aggressively work to change the incentives, policies, and structures so that they encourage and free up schools to innovate. This is the first of three white papers looking at system redesign from a variety of perspectives. Our next paper, "The Case for Coherent High Schools" [see: ED556237], examines the challenges of high school redesign. Our third and final paper, "Redesigning the District Operating System [see: ED563481], explains why there must be updated central office systems to allow school-level initiative and problem solving.

In summer of 2014, two groups of scholars and policy experts met separately to rethink educational accountability. These groups came from what most would consider different "camps" on school reform--one focused on transforming teaching for "deeper learning" and the other focused on choice as a means for leveraging school improvement. However, both were motivated by concern that accountability as enacted under No Child Left Behind had begun to create a strait jacket for schools that was undermining the goals of improvement and equity. At the same time, both groups felt it important to maintain the law's goals of focusing the nation on raising achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. Both believed the federal government still must play a role in ensuring that states and localities work seriously and effectively to improve options for children at risk. The papers resulting from these separate sets of discussions agreed on many important points, including that: (1) Parents and the public need to know whether children are learning what they need to graduate high school, enter and complete four-year college, or get a rewarding, career-ladder job; (2) Student test scores can provide valuable information, but they should be used in combination with other valid evidence of school effectiveness and student progress (e.g., course completion, progress toward graduation, and more); (3) Assessment of schools should focus on meaningful learning, not just on what is easiest to test. Measures should be tightly linked to the knowledge and skills needed for college and career readiness, including students' abilities to learn and solve problems independently, and apply knowledge; (4) Because a student's level and pace of learning in any one year depend in part on what was learned previously and on the efforts of many professionals working together, the consequences of high and low performance should attach to whole schools, rather than to individual educators; (5) School leaders must have sufficient authority, flexibility, and resources to lead their schools and must take affirmative responsibility for fostering school-wide collaboration aimed at continuous improvement in teaching and learning; and (6) States and school districts must have and exercise multiple options when children learn at low rates that threaten their adult opportunities, including remedying resource shortfalls, supporting teacher and leader improvement, changing school staffing, redesigning or replacing chronically ineffective schools, assigning schools to new managers, and allowing families to choose other school options. This paper shows that these agreements have important implications for the design of accountability systems at the local, state, and federal levels, particularly: (1) The need for evidence, judgment, and action, used in combination to ensure that all children learn effectively and that schools continuously improve; (2) The importance both of testing with high-quality instruments used appropriately, and of considering multiple sources of evidence in judging student, educator, or school performance; (3) The need for sophisticated judgment systems that put data in context and weigh and balance evidence to determine constructive actions; (4) The need for a clear and sensible delineation of the roles of different levels of government; and (5) The need for continued capacity building and experimentation with approaches to accountability. This paper ends with five implications for the reauthorization of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (ESEA).

The lack of productivity of school systems stems from a number of reasons, including the way in which schools are governed. The author explains in this paper that policies from on high often work against campuses being more productive. His list includes state policies that stop districts from hiring experts to teach subjects that other educators aren't prepared to teach. As with the other papers in this series, Hill explains how to change the bias against productivity. This paper ends with definite recommendations about how new governance arrangements can promote productivity.iii Many of these ideas are already present, in at least rudimentary form, in leading school districts including New York City, New Orleans, and Denver. These are pursuing a "portfolio strategy" of continuous improvement.iv However, districts following this strategy are exceptions to the norm in K-12 public education. This paper will show how, in the vast majority of localities, current governance arrangements encourage little effort on behalf of productivity. It will also lay out preconditions for productivity, which will establish premises for a proposed new governance system. [A list of resources is included.]

This brief outlines how new K-12 public education governance proposals--relinquishment, smart districts, and the urban school system of the future--are complements, not alternatives, to the portfolio strategy. The portfolio strategy defines the role of government, or how it can steer in public education; the other proposals show how, once government's role is redefined, independent organizations will develop capacity to row (provide schools, assist schools, develop teacher skills, etc.). The portfolio strategy needs mechanisms for operating and improving schools, such as those provided by the other reforms. The other reforms, reciprocally, depend on the portfolio strategy to provide preconditions that they cannot create by themselves. (Contains 2 tables and 8 footnotes.)

America's system for financing K-12 education is not neutral about innovation and the use of new technologies. Indeed, that system is stacked against them. To remedy this, our education-funding system needs to shift dramatically. Instead of today's model--which rigidly funds programs, staff positions, and administrative structures, instead of schools and students--we need an approach in which funding follows the student. At present, America's charter school finance structure provides the best prototype, but even it does not go far enough. An appropriate school-finance system must also be able to defend ineffective schools and provide space and incentives for online providers to bring their products to the marketplace. (Contains 1 table and 13 endnotes.)

This is the first report from an ongoing study of four urban school districts (New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and the District of Columbia) that are experimenting with new school designs and new ways of holding schools accountable for performance. This report introduces the idea of a "portfolio school district," and shows how some leading school districts have put the idea into practice. The report's goal is to help district and community leaders throughout the country judge whether a similar approach could improve the schools in their localities, and if they decide in the affirmative, how to approach building a portfolio strategy of their own. As this report will show, rebuilding a school district on the portfolio model involves challenges of many kinds--technical, organizational, and political. Reform leaders in the districts the authors have studied have made great progress but still have many problems to solve. (Contains 1 figure, 3 tables, and 15 footnotes.)

The search continues for effective ways to educate disadvantaged children in big cities. Different cities have tried varied approaches--intensive work on the professional skills of teachers and administrators in Boston, standardized approaches to instruction in San Diego, and extensive use of vouchers and chartering in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee. Though some school districts have shown flexibility, government and education sector leaders in some cities have become convinced that they must look outside the traditional boundaries of the district for new ideas, talent, and learning opportunities. While also trying to strengthen existing public schools, leaders in several cities, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and the District of Columbia, have adopted a "portfolio strategy". The essence of a portfolio strategy is the provision of public education by multiple means. Districts pursuing a portfolio strategy (portfolio districts) sponsor some schools operated by district employees in the traditional way, and others operated by independent organizations and run under new rules. District and community leaders in cities adopting a portfolio strategy (presently including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Philadelphia, Hartford, and the District of Columbia, among others) must search for answers to questions that have seldom been asked in American public education: (1) How do they know whether a given school or initiative is likely to succeed or fail?; (2) When do they shore up a struggling school or abandon it?; (3) How do they avoid being stuck with no option other than to continue supporting a school in which children are not learning?; and (4) How do they make sure students are not hurt by closing a school or replacing one school provider with another? This paper is the first to offer answers to these questions. The authors hoped to mine the experiences of other organizations that have developed the capacity to oversee diverse portfolios of service providers, and to apply lessons learned to the challenges districts face as they adopt portfolio-based strategies. While acknowledging that public education is unique in many ways, the project tried to use the practices evident in other organizations as sources of ideas, and it applies them to education cautiously. Subsequent papers, based on a recently funded national study of districts pursuing portfolio strategies, will provide detailed examples of data systems, analytical methods, and decisionmaking processes. These papers will be available in late 2010. "Managing School Performance" Working Paper Series are appended. (Contains 4 tables and 24 footnotes.)

This report is the final result of a six-year study of America's school finance system, including more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million and involving an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country's best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation. All this work leads to one conclusion, that school finance today works against the focused and efficient use of resources to promote student learning. Recognizing the complexity and subtle nature of both the problem and the systems responsible for funding schools, the Center on Reinventing Public Education proposed a multi-year applied research and development strategy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the summer of 2003. The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) would have four goals: (1) Provide an empirical basis and policy options for redesigning the nation's K-12 school finance systems to support student performance; (2) Integrate research with state policy initiatives; (3) Educate the audiences that influence school finance policy and practice; and (4) Craft implementation tools for practitioners. This final report integrates the project's findings on the first three of these objectives. The fourth (implementation tools) is partially covered in a series of working papers commissioned by the project between 2003 and 2007 and is proposed as the major focus of follow-on work in 2008-09. Appendices include: (1) The National Working Group on Funding Student Learning; (2) Background Papers; and (3) Recommendation Comparison. (Contains 3 tables, 13 figures, and 16 footnotes.)

Big-city school systems face many problems, including high dropout rates, low academic achievement, and achievement gaps between middle-class and low-income children. Many big-city systems are also losing enrollment and facing financial deficits. These problems inevitably lead to criticism of the boards that govern urban school districts, and questions about whether some other governance arrangement might get better results. Seattle faces the same problems as other big-city districts. Critics of the school board have pointed to a few cities that have put mayors in charge of public schools in hope of overcoming political paralysis, pursuing consistent reform strategies, narrowing the achievement gap, and bringing expenses in line with revenues. This paper explores the underlying logic of mayoral interventions into public education, their consequences to date, and their possible suitability for Seattle. The report highlights a range of reforms that aim to improve the governance of urban school districts. (Contains 50 footnotes and 1 table.)

In the past decade, controversies about public spending on education have grown as states adopted performance standards pledging that every child will learn enough to become an independent productive citizen and as "No Child Left Behind" ("NCLB") has put teeth into those expectations. Educators say that meeting higher standards requires more money. Some policymakers claim that past spending increases were large enough to pay for higher performance if funds were used productively. Critics of demands for more money point to cases where major spending increases were misspent, with little or no impact on student learning. In this environment, elected officials, especially governors and state legislators, have searched for answers to two questions: How much money will it take for all students to meet standards and how should the money be spent? The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) was created to help elected officials better understand how the finance system currently works and to identify options in allocating resources to support K-12 education. The project now includes more than 20 separate projects. This Interim Report explains the question, the research strategies, and the ways how results will be presented. Early findings indicate that educators feel pressures to close achievement gaps and raise overall levels of student learning, but they have a great deal of difficulty changing how they spend money and time and how they select and train staff. (Contains 1 footnote and 1 table.) [This report was produced by the Center on Reinventing Public Education's School Finance Redesign Project.]

This paper explains how the public education system resists reforms and shows how to make much higher-performing schools available to disadvantaged children. It explains why change is so difficult and why seemingly obvious solutions will not work. The paper also shows how new ideas about teaching, learning, and effective schooling can take hold, and details a portfolio management system--new set of structures and incentives that fosters innovation, adaptability, and performance. Portfolio management is a new and different vision for education reform. It dramatically changes the roles, responsibilities, and incentives of virtually everyone in the public education system. Instead of trying to refurbish an old, ineffective public education structure, it aims to raze the current system to the ground and build a new one. Certainly, the need for such dramatic change is clear. Encumbered by a system that resists meaningful reform, the nation's schools are unable to educate millions of poor and minority students. If reformers are to build such a system, however, they must be prepared to stay with the effort and avoid partial measures. Just as new structures do not get slapped up overnight, this change will take time and effort. After all, it will require nothing less than the total transformation of the nation's public education system. (Contains 25 endnotes, 3 tables, and 1 figure.)

Long before the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina or the chaos of evacuation, New Orleans' social infrastructure was failing. News coverage of the overcrowded Superdome and the city's flooded streets exposed the poverty and vulnerability of many residents, especially African Americans. As New Orleans begins to rebuild, can the city avoid the mistakes of the past, instead creating more effective social support for low-income and minority residents? Innovation and experience from other U.S. cities offer promising strategies for reducing the risks of poverty and opening up opportunities for economic security and success. This essay is from an Urban Institute collection that addresses employment, affordable housing, public schools, young children?s needs, health care, arts and culture, and vulnerable populations. All these essays assess the challenges facing New Orleans today and for years to come and recommend tested models for making the city's social infrastructure stronger and more equitable than it was before Katrina (Contains 4 notes.)

The 2004-05 school year was tumultuous for charter schools, marked by dueling studies with conflicting conclusions on whether charter schools boost student performance or hinder it. Even before this dustup occurred, a consortium of foundations decided to support a new national research center to raise the standard of research on charter schools and provide balanced perspectives on issues that had become polarized. The result was the National Charter School Research Project (NCSRP), which is the author of this report. The report is in two parts. In the first, NCSRP provides new data that inform questions such as: Is the charter school movement growing or slowing down? Do charter schools serve more or fewer disadvantaged children than regular public schools? Are charter schools innovative? The report also identifies several important questions on which state and local record keeping needs to be improved. The second part of this report takes up issues and controversies that characterized the discussion of charter schools in 2004-2005. NCSRP's goal is to provide essays that examine these controversies in a broad context and assemble evidence in a balanced and informative way. The essays are unlikely to settle any of these issues definitively, but they may establish a more constructive basis for continued discussion. Appended are: (1) About the Authors; (2) Data Sources & Methods for Chapter 1; and (3) Charter Schools & Student Achievement: List of Studies Reviewed.

This paper focuses on the administrative costs of vouchers programs. It considers the tasks that public and private agencies must undertake and estimates the administrative burdens and cash flow that local programs create. It assumes that all voucher programs, including those meant in part to reduce overcrowding, will be voluntary. The paper starts by identifying the administrative arrangements that must be made for any public voucher program and by outlining typical roles for state government, the local education agency, a special voucher program office, and individual private schools admitting voucher students. It also examines in detail some vital administrative functions that must be coordinated among these entities. The second section focuses on the person-power and financial demands that a voucher program is likely to impose on state government, the local education agency, the voucher program office, and private schools. The final section presents estimates of the probable gross and net annual dollar costs of voucher program administration as borne by state government and cooperating local school districts. All the cost estimates are approximate. (Author/WFA)

This paper lays out a performance-based model to better leverage the mission and power of school boards toward improving student learning. It moves beyond discussions about whether boards should be elected or appointed, instead arguing that mode of selection is less directly responsible for board success than clarity and focus about its mission and its role. The paper examines key issues and provides recommendations for school reform. The paper is organized into three parts: part 1, "Why the Existing Structure of Oversight Does Not Promote School Performance"; part 2, "What Performance-Focused Oversight of Schools Would Entail"; and part 3, "How the Missions and Activities of School Boards and District Central Offices Must Change." The paper concludes with a table, supplemented by text, on governance alternatives, and a table, also supplement by text, that compares board missions under two new governance models. The paper ends with a brief discussion of responsibility and accountability in light of recent educational legislation. (Contains 29 endnotes and 2 tables.) (WFA)

Though the public believes that urban school boards should handle problems with failing schools, urban school boards spend very little time considering ways to turn such schools around or transforming the educational experiences of at-risk students. Today's school board members are expected to be interest representatives, trustees for children, and delegates of the state. These missions are in conflict because they require boards to serve different masters and accomplish different objectives. Mission confusion is one reason why school boards often look disorganized. Legislatures exercise great control over local school boards, since boards operate on a grant of authority from the state. School board duties are defined via accretion. Past approaches to school board missions (i.e., discipline via standards, school board training, and imitating boards of private business) have failed. Options for righting the balance in favor of trusteeship include broadening the constituency to which school board members answer, limiting school boards' basic powers and duties, and eliminating school boards' exclusive authority to oversee schools in a particular geographic area. Three appendices contain data on school board duties defined by accretion under state law, school board responsibilities, and how state and mayoral takeovers have changed school board powers. (Contains 26 footnotes.) (SM)

The most important burden of charter schools is the need to demonstrate that the instruction they provide actually benefits students. They can hire their own teachers, make their own tradeoffs between spending on administration and teaching, locate anywhere in the community, and let parents know in advance what a child must do to succeed in the school. Therefore, charter schools are exempt from many rules, and instead are required to demonstrate student learning. Unlike conventional schools, however, charter schools can lose their public funding and be forced to close if they cannot demonstrate that their students are indeed learning. The question becomes whether performance can replace compliance as a mechanism of accountability to government? Does dependence on parents and teachers force charter schools to ignore their responsibilities to the public? This report studies individual charter schools and their authorizers with differing legal provisions in six states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. It asks how the schools' relationships with authorizers affect their day-to-day operations, and how they develop relationships of trust and confidence. Major findings regarding internal accountability are discussed. The appendix covers survey data and analysis methods. (DFR)

An accountability system is proposed for the education system in Washington. Reform efforts in Washington have been designed to create a school-centered system in which state standards motivate teachers, parents, and principals to search for more effective ways to help students learn. Drawing on the experience of other states, recommendations are made for a statewide accountability system that will: (1) promote school-level instructional improvement by eliminating compliance-oriented rules and regulations and transferring real-dollar resources to schools; (2) stimulate creation of a range of public and private assistance sources; (3) measure and report real, unadjusted student achievement scores; (4) empower local school districts to classify schools, reward success at the local level, work with struggling schools, and reconstitute schools that consistently fail their students; (5) re-align the responsibilities of existing state agencies; (6) create a new State Accountability Commission to review school district progress toward the state standards; and (7) allow teachers and principals to hold students accountable for diligent effort and reasonable behavior. The proposed accountability system meets the standard that all education reform efforts must meet, that of being serious enough to make real measures of student performance, assign clear responsibilities to all actors, and acknowledge the connections between educators' efforts and student achievement. (Contains two figures, two tables, and seven references.) An appendix reviews five state accountability designs. (SLD)

In March 1995 the Ohio General Assembly enacted a Pilot Project Scholarship Program intended to provide a limited number of vouchers to allow Cleveland public school students to attend alternative schools, i.e. private schools, including those operated by religious organizations, within the Cleveland city limits and public schools in surrounding suburban school districts. Vouchers were to be available for the first time in the 1996-97 school year. Voucher winners were to be chosen by lottery, with voucher winners accepted by lottery into the alternative schools with preferences given for current students and their siblings. The maximum voucher value was to be $2,500, with reductions for increasing income above the federal poverty line until eligibility ended at 200% of the poverty level. Students, once admitted, could continue receiving vouchers through grade 8, subject to continued funding by the state. Although about 4,000 families were made some kind of voucher offer, many refused. An evaluation was designed to determine why so many did not enroll, and the significance this might have for future program management and evaluation. The designed evaluation will have a study of parent choice and satisfaction, with interviews with at least 25 parents (those that enrolled children and those that did not), and a study of the initial effectiveness of the program in terms of student achievement, subject to the limitations of available data. The rationale behind and planned implementation of both evaluation components are described. (SLD)

This document addresses the difficulties of urban education, particularly relating to inner cities that contain immigrant and minority students, and argues that schools contribute to the problems of today's urban youth and that schools must do a better job of educating students. It recognizes that schools are burdened by the urban environment but contends that the public cannot wait to change schools until other problems are solved. It grants that someone must address problems, such as poor student health and family instability, but argues that educators have enough to worry about in their own backyards. Better schools will not solve all the problems of American cities, but they are definitely part of the solution. Further, the document argues that: (1) bad public schools are making their own distinct contributions to the problems of cities, (2) there is a substantial consensus among educators and parents about how schools can be made to work for disadvantaged and minority students in the big cities, (3) better inner-city schools are unlikely given today's methods of financing and governance, and (4) better schools are possible in the inner city but only if efforts are made to make a major change in what is meant by a public school. (Contains 19 references.) (GLR)

The United States is experiencing a wave of immigration unprecedented since the early 1900s. This report examines the schooling needs of immigrant students, assesses how well those needs are being met, and suggests strategies for improving schooling outcomes for immigrants. Immigrant education is examined as a political issue and as a challenge facing overburdened school systems. Data were collected from a purposive sample of 8 school districts and 55 schools. Six large urban districts that enroll the overwhelming majority of immigrant students nationally were included. A more detailed analysis was performed of the transcripts of 745 students in Los Angeles (California) schools, and 38 interviews were conducted with state-level policymakers across 6 states. Among the major conclusions is that immigrants, although they represent only a fraction of the nation's youth, are a growing population, heavily concentrated in a few areas of the country. Immigrant education is not a visible policy issue, and the needs of immigrant students are not generally recognized. The quality of schooling that immigrants receive depends on the capacity of the communities in which they live, and many have inadequate resources. Immigrant students have unmet needs that are unique to their newcomer status. Thirteen tables present study data. (Contains 55 references.) (SLD)

Although only a few dozen school systems have formally embraced site-based management, thousands of districts across the country are experimenting with it in some form. The study described in this report attempts to distill the experience of pioneering school systems, so that citizens and educators in other localities can benefit from it. During the 1989-90 and 1990-91 school years, a RAND research team studied five major urban and suburban school systems that had adopted site-based management: Columbus, Ohio; Dade County, Florida; Edmonton, Alberta (Canada); Jefferson County (Louisville), Kentucky; and Prince William County, Virginia. Newspaper and scholarly accounts of site-based management in other communities were also considered. The report draws five major conclusions: (1) though site-based management focuses on individual schools, it is really a reform of the entire school system; (2) site-based management will lead to real changes at the school level only if it is a school system's basic reform strategy; (3) site-based schools are likely to evolve over time and to develop distinctive characters, goals, and operating styles; (4) a system of distinctive, site-based schools requires a rethinking of accountability; and (5) the ultimate accountability mechanism for a system of distinctive site-based schools is parental choice. These findings have specific implications for the entire school community. An appendix provides an overview of the five districts studied. (MLH)