In 1976 the National Institute of Education established the Research and Development Utilization (RDU) Program. This project was intended to apply research and development products to local school problems; to develop a problem-solving and product selection process usable by local schools and to organize a linkage system making national, state,…

In discussing the improvement of schools by using research and development findings, two different outcomes of a change program are considered. One is the effective implementation of new programs through use of available knowledge. The second is the broader issue of achieving school improvement through making the organization more healthy, the…

The Research and Development Utilization Program (RDU) was intended to apply research and development products to local school problems; to develop a problem-solving and product selection process usable by local schools; and to organize a linkage system making national, state, and other external resources available to local school personnel. The…

The movement toward integration of qualitative and quantitative research methods within the same study has been most evident in social policy research. Four major approaches to integrating can be identified in recent studies. The sequential, the parallel, and the fused models have been rather widely used. The interactive model, developed during…

An examination of the effect of intervention strategies utilized in the Research and Development Utilization (RDU) Program on school improvement outcomes was the subject of this document. The basic Federal/State approaches to support local school improvement efforts are a coercive/manipulative approach, direct support, or indirect support.…

This paper examines the complexity and ambiguity of policies that purport to promote deregulation and decentralization of education. The paper describes the development of decentralization/deregulation policies in the Netherlands and applies the specific dilemmas faced in the country to the unexpected difficulty in preparing and passing a…

Interest in the relationship of entrepreneurship to organizational performance and validity is widely and increasingly discussed in educational contexts. An examination of academic entrepreneurship is presented in this paper. Five types of entrepreneurship are described, and many questions more directly related to organizational theory are…

Several aspects of unplanned system change in schools are investigated in this paper. Researchers relied heavily on current theoretical perspectives on the nature of educational systems, particularly those that emphasize the "loosely coupled" nature of educational organizations. Two hypotheses were tested. The first is that natural…

Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that in 24 selected restructuring elementary, middle, and high schools, professional community is strongly associated with technical (measured as authentic pedagogy) and social (measured as social support for achievement) dimensions of classroom organization. The relationships between authentic pedagogy…