This article is designed to help educational leaders and university faculty who prepare them become aware of the increasing need to view the self-evaluation of leadership preparation programs as a pivotal new starting point in efforts to improve schools. An effective self-evaluation will lead to better preparation programs and, with other conditions, to better subsequent practice. The article begins with an outline of incentives and disincentives for proceeding with self-evaluation. It continues with highlights of inner structural changes required for initiating self-evaluation. The rest of the article offers a selfevaluation model that includes the use of outcome-based standards. The evaluation design is presented step-by-step and in great detail, including evaluation questions, evaluation criteria, evaluation data, and data collection procedures and analyses, as well as faculty and student roles in each step of the process. The model is offered as an example rather than as a dictum, a debate opener rather than a debate summarizer.
The Chicago school reforms have received significant national attention due to their sweeping, radical nature. Growing out of state legislation in 1988 and 1995, the reforms encompass a powerful bottom‐up/top‐down strategy that provides multiple avenues for initiating building‐level changes in teaching and learning. We offer a provisional answer concerning the effects of these reforms by comparing the 1993–1998 performance of Chicago's grammar schools with all other grade‐equivalent schools in the State of Illinois. We find city schools making major gains over the last three years. Regression residuals show that Chicago's schools now significantly outperform Cook County suburban schools and schools in the rest of the state after controlling for rates of poverty and student mobility. While schools placed on probation have predominantly African American and low‐income student bodies, rates of improvement among schools as a whole appear to be equitably distributed across the city neighborhoods. We close with several policy recommendations, one of which focuses on the potential for major goal displacement as a result of the reform board's criterion for determining the probationary status of schools.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.