Blockchain Papers

Martin R. West, Ludger Wöβmann

No abstract is available for this record.

Jeannine L. Fox

The claim that autonomy in the classroom and freedom from bureaucracy will stimulate innovation in teaching and learning and result in improved student achievement is based on an assumption that all bureaucracy is bad. The that Ms. Fox studied suggest, however, that this assumption is facile at best. IN FALL 1997, Ohio adopted a plan for the implementation of in its eight largest urban school districts in fall 1998. Subsequent legislation allowed the establishment of in any of Ohio's 21 large urban districts or in any school district declared by the state board of education to be in a situation of academic emergency. Because all private and public in Ohio receive charters from the state, these new kinds of are referred to as community-charter schools or As I've done in the title, I'll use these terms throughout the rest of this article to distinguish Ohio's from those in other states and from the general concept of schools. Charter school advocates claim that will be successful primarily because they are free from rules, regulations, and the weight of bureaucracy -- normal aspects of public school systems. They believe that will provide better student performance in exchange for this autonomy.1 According to Bruno Manno and his colleagues, the charter concept is simple but powerful: sound school choices can be provided to families under the umbrella of public education without micromanagement by government bureaucracies.2 This anti-bureaucratic ideology contends that the top-down bureaucratic system, with all its rules and regulations from state and local education agencies, inhibits efforts to innovate in public schools.3 The idea that freedom from rules and regulations will guarantee innovative practices in governance as well as in teaching and learning provides a basis for the argument favoring autonomy within a school structure.4 Many school advocates the notion that educational innovations develop best from decentralized, bottom-up sources.5 Charter present an opportunity to the power from bureaucracies to the themselves and ultimately to the individuals responsible for them -- educators, parents, and students.6 The from bureaucratic to autonomous governance brings potential for expanded, inclusive, and localized democratic decision making.7 This shift allows individual to make most of their own decisions regarding budget, personnel, curriculum, and instructional program. Some argue that, in each school, only those closest to the students -- teachers, support staff members, administrators, and parents -- should make the necessary decisions regarding restructuring.8 Waivers from bureaucratic rules and regulations create the potential for innovations that could result in increased academic achievement for students.9 However, the assumption that autonomy will result in governance structures that support grassroots involvement in decision making and so lead to more innovative educational environments has been examined in only a few studies.10 In a qualitative case study of four of Ohio's community-supported schools, I sought to describe the organizational structures of the to determine who was involved in making formal and informal decisions affecting life in the and whether those structures supported empowerment of the staff in grassroots governance.11 My descriptive study addressed the question of whether participants perceived their schools' cultures to be conducive to enhanced learning environments for students. Eighteen teachers, four administrators, and one governing board member took part in individual interviews and focus groups, all conducted at their school sites. The initial group of three used for this qualitative case study were selected from the 15 opened in large urban districts in Ohio during the 1998-99 school year. …

Thomas J. Nechyba

While the issue of school finance has been studied extensively, relatively little effort has been devoted to understanding how school finance policies impact the nature of communities. This is peculiar in light of substantial evidence that public school quality – at least in the U.S. – has much to do with residential choices by households, and in light of increasing empirical evidence that residential segregation perpetuates income inequality. In this paper, I emphasize in particular the importance of considering not only the level of government that is funding public schools but also the role played by the private sector as well as its interaction with the existing public school system. Somewhat surprisingly, simulation results based on U.S. data suggest that, in terms of producing spatial income segregation, the role of centralization versus decentralization of public school financing is quite secondary to the role played by the private sector. A purely public school system – regardless of the degree of centralization of school finance – results in substantially more spatial segregation than a purely private system. However, it is the combination of a (centralized or decentralized) public system with a private school market that yields the least residential segregation as housing price distortions from the capitalization of the public system generate incentives for middle and high income private school attendees to live with lower income public school attendees. Motivated by this insight, additional simulations involving explicit government support for private schools in the form of vouchers are reported, and the sensitivity of results to alternative school production models is tested. 1

David F. Labaree

We have increasingly held the view that education is a private good, which should serve the individual interests of educational consumers, rather than a public good, which should serve the broader public interest in producing competent citizens and productive workers, Mr. Labaree points out. And the last thing we think we need is a standards effort that equalizes educational achievement. THE MATTER OF setting standards for American education is certainly quite visible these days, but much of what we hear about it is not very enlightening. The talk is frequently filled with ideological heat rather than with critical light, and the tone of the discussion is more often nostalgic than realistic. In addition, the pitch in favor of standards is currently so strong that it may well leave a number of listeners wondering why such an obviously needed and beneficial reform wasn't undertaken a long time ago. But the fact is that the effort to establish educational standards has always been an uphill fight in this country. In light of these circumstances, it is useful to examine why Americans have so vigorously resisted educational standards over the years. The history of such resistance suggests that there are three factors in particular that have made standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think about educational accomplishment. All three of these factors, which I treat below, can be traced in large part to our preference for one particular purpose of education: we have increasingly held the view that education is a private good, which should serve the individual interests of educational consumers, rather than a public good, which should serve the broader public interest in producing competent citizens and productive workers. Preserving Local Control First, consider our traditional commitment to preserving local control. The core issue here is the wide and deep strain of libertarian sentiment that lies at the heart of the American psyche. The urge to preserve individual liberty is a key to understanding American society, and it is what defines our distinctive approach to politics, economics, and education. Don't tell me what to do? has long been our national slogan. By it we have meant in particular that government should keep off our backs - especially government that is far removed from our local community. All you need to do is remember that this nation was born of an uprising against a colonial government that tried to impose modest taxes on it from afar. In education, this sentiment came to be expressed as a staunch defense of local control of our schools. During most of the 19th century, the local school was the primary unit of educational governance for most Americans. An individual community built a school, hired a teacher, raised money through local taxes and fees, and implemented education on its own terms. Outside help was neither offered nor welcomed. This was the ultimate in local control. Even in large cities, control of education tended to rest at the ward level. Consider some numbers that suggest the radical degree of decentralization that has long characterized American education. It was not until 1937 that we started recording information about the number of individual school systems in the country. In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the U.S. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts - each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schools. …

Penny Bender Sebring, Anthony S. Bryk

In their study of Chicago school reform, the authors discovered that the principals of productive elementary schools skillfully use a number of strategies to promote the efforts of both parents and teachers who work directly with children. EIGHT YEARS of research on Chicago school reform show that local control has facilitated significant improvements in student achievement in a large proportion of elementary schools. It is also clear that, under Chicago's decentralization plan, the quality of the principal's leadership is a critical factor in determining whether a school moves forward to improve learning opportunities for students. Evidence comes from investigations carried out by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, including surveys of teachers, principals, local leaders, and students, as well as in-depth case studies of dozens of schools.1 Previous longitudinal analyses of standardized test scores had produced an estimate of the value added to student learning by each elementary school and whether this measure had been improving.2 We have linked our data to these analyses and are now in a position to share what we have learned about successful principal leadership aimed at improving academic achievement. During the 1990s, Chicago witnessed gradual but consistent improvement in student test scores. In 1990, about a quarter of the students in grades 3 through 8 reached national norms in reading and mathematics. By 1999, this proportion had grown to 35% in reading and 43% in math. One-third of the elementary schools (most include eighth grade) raised the percentage of students reaching national norms in reading by at least 15%. Almost half of the schools showed an increase of between 5% and 14%.3 While far too many students still fail to reach national norms, this steady upward trend is encouraging. This same period saw the establishment of local control under the framework of the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. The law created parent-dominated Local School Councils (LSCs) for each school and gave them the power to hire and fire their principals. Principals gained greater autonomy in selecting their staff, and they received new resources relative to the number of low-income students their school served. Eventually, elementary schools received an average of $500,000 a year, which could be used to finance improvements.4 In 1995, the state legislature handed control of the school system to the mayor, giving him the right to name a five-member school board and the chief executive officer of the system. With the extensive news coverage of the mayor's new team, most outsiders failed to realize that the 1995 reform left local control intact: LSCs were not affected, and neither were their formal authority or their resources.5 Key Elements of Principal Leadership in Productive Schools The underlying assumption behind the Chicago reform is that local actors, if given adequate authority and resources, will be able to solve local problems effectively. Along with granting this autonomy, the 1988 reform law dramatically reshaped the sanctions and incentives for principals. Instead of reporting to their central administration superiors, principals became locally accountable. They now work under four-year performance contracts subject to LSC review. Most important, when they successfully introduce improvements, local leaders recognize and appreciate their efforts. We found three common elements among principals of productive schools: their leadership style, their strategies, and the issues on which they focus. A central theme emerging from our research is that principals of improving Chicago elementary schools skillfully use a combination of support and pressure to promote the efforts of adults who work directly with children. Leadership Style Several features characterize the leadership style of principals of productive schools: an inclusive, facilitative orientation; an institutional focus on student learning; efficient management; and a reliance on a combination of pressure and support to motivate others. …

Miguel Urquiola

No abstract is available for this record.

Alec Ian Gershberg

Over the past decade, the multilateral development community' has espoused the fiscal and administrative decentralization of the social sectors and often specifically of primary and secondary schooling (e.g., see IDB, 1994: 194; Dillinger, 1995). Although nearly every country in Latin America has undertaken some form of educational decentralization, very little is known about the attributes of such policies. They often go hand in hand with a call for increased parental and community involvement (see Dimmock, Donoghue, and Robb, 1996) that has come both from the top down (e.g., from the multilateral community) and from the bottom up (e.g., from grassroots organizations and nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]). Since 1993, Nicaragua has set in motion one of the most radical educational decentralization experiments in Latin America. Its autonomous schools program implements a system of school-based management with local school-site councils that have a voting majority of parents and allocate resources that derive in part from fees charged to parents. Nowhere in Latin America have parents officially been given so much responsibility, and nowhere have they been asked to provide directly such a large proportion of school resources. The confluence of transferring responsibilities to schoolsite councils and the charging of fees is not coincidental. Both derive from social movements solidly within the so-called neoliberal reform model

Michael Walton Clover

This study was designed to determine the flexibility that the principals of Cumberland County Schools in Fayetteville, North Carolina preferred when implementing financial site-based decision-making in their schools. The current budget framework limits the principals to approximately three percent of the total allotment in which independent flexibility is permissible. To complete the research, the fund categories representing areas of educational functions and service in the school system chart of accounts were evaluated. Seventy-two principals in the Cumberland County Schools were asked to indicate by priority their desire to gain flexibility over budget categories from the chart of accounts that have the greatest potential for improving the learning process (50 principals participated). The principals represented elementary, middle, and high schools. A three-phase process of data collection and analysis was incorporated in the study. First, an analytical hierarchy process was used to identify priorities of budget categories by the school principals. This format allowed for multiple criteria variables to be employed. Secondly, a survey instrument was used to obtain the principals' views of financial site-based budgeting. The analysis of this data included determining the frequency with which the categories were selected. Finally, a random sampling of the 50 principals that participated in the two earlier phases were interviewed so that gaps in the data could be identified. The findings indicated that principals in Cumberland County have a strong desire to gain control over the funds they feel will help them improve the learning process. The ABCs (Accountability and High Standards, The Basics and Maximum Local Control) reform movement in North Carolina is a vital step in preparing students for the twenty-first century and the principals agreed that financial flexibility should be an ingredient of this reform. The principals did not indicate a desire to revamp the school finance process, but desired to have more flexibility in the use of funds associated with instructional programs. It was determined that the category of employee salaries and benefits, which was the first choice of their top four priorities, was the one in which they had the least flexibility at the school level. The analysis of the data from the asses interviews revealed that, from this single intervention of budget decentralization believed they could make significant changes in their educational programs without adding additional funds to the educational budget.

Ross Rubenstein

recent years, a number of large urban school districts have begun efforts to decentralize important decision making authority from the central district office to the local school level, giving greater control over budgeting and management to school staff and parents. Mirroring this approach, school finance researchers are increasingly examining resource allocation issues at more microlevels, such as schools and classrooms. In analyzing funding equity, however, much of the focus has remained at the district-level. While district-level analyses are particularly appropriate for examining systematic relationships between funding levels and district tax bases, they can obscure important resource disparities that may arise between schools within a single district. These issues may be especially critical in large urban districts serving diverse student populations and many students with special needs. This study seeks to help fill this gap by examining resource allocations at the school level in the Chicago Public Schools. Specifically, this article investigates the equity of school-level resource allocations in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) for the 1994-95 school year, the sixth year following the passage of the Chicago School Reform Act. In order to better understand the intradistrict distribution of funding to schools, the article summarizes the results of quantitative analyses of CPS school-level budgets. Because of the inherent difficulties in measuring value-laden concepts such as equity, this article uses a variety of methods and mea

Carla Edlefson

Financing Schools for High Performance: Strategies for Improving the Use of Educational Resources by Allan Odden and Carolyn Busch, Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco, 1998. $31.95 ISBN 0-787-94060-7 Review by Carla Edlefson Ashland University Ashland, Ohio long-term task is to get schools...to act more like producers of high levels of student achievement rather than mere consumers of educational resources or providers of traditional educational services (p. 25). Thus begins Financing Schools for High Performance, a book that links the current best thinking about school funding with what we know about school improvement. The central theme of the book is that there are ways to use current resources better and...schools can begin the process of increasing student achievement with funds already in the education system (p. 164). The first chapter summarizes research indicating that wealthy and poor school districts have similar patterns of resource allocation. High-spending districts do not pay salaries that are all that much higher, and they don't have a lower student-to-teacher ratio in the core academic subjects. They do hire more staff who are specialists, to deal with various kinds of student needs, but these specialists have little effect on student achievement. What does affect student achievement, according to chapter two, is to center change on student learning and a rigorous instructional program (p. 29) and to decentralize decisions about staff and resources to the building level. Part two, chapters three through five, describes three models that state governments could emulate in order to decentralize school funding. Chapter three presents the charter school model and provides a useful comparison of legislation passed by 26 U.S. states, as of December 1996. The authors stress that the success of charter schools will depend on whether or not they are adequately funded and given real authority over the use of their resources. Chapters four and five describe in some detail the funding systems in England and in Victoria, Australia, as demonstrations that site-based funding does work. Chapter six lays out steps that a state could take to structure a site-based school financing system. They are: 1) identify what will be district-level responsibilities and what will be handled at the site; 2) divide the district budget into two parts: the central office and the sites; 3) design an allocation formula to distribute the site budget to the individual schools, taking into account special student needs, etc.; 4) determine what kind of documentation schools will do; e.g., linking their budget to their school improvement plans. The recommendation is that a state would pass legislation requiring districts to do site-based budgeting and then hold individual schools accountable for student achievement results. This book is directed more at policy experts than practitioners, but chapters seven and eight should be of interest to secondary school administrators. Chapter seven, Reallocating Education Dollars' to Improve Results, cites research on individual schools that have adopted reform models, and within existing resource levels, have reallocated and restructured in order to improve student outcomes. Characteristics of these high performance schools include a) curriculum based on high standards b) whole-school reform; c) students grouped differently for instruction; d) teacher involvement in decision-making; and e) emphasis on professional development (pp. 168-169). For example, the New American Schools (NAS) project (www.naschools.org) has tested seven different reform models. Even though each of the models requires money for new people or materials, Odden and Busch show that with reallocation, a school that has resources equal to the national average could not only afford to implement any of the NAS models, but also have money left over. …

Abby Riddell

No abstract is available for this record.

Chris Pipho

In the world of business and finance, the old phrase cooking the books implies that manipulating financial ledgers will produce an illicit advantage for someone. Maybe this practice is used more often in movie and TV scripts than in real life, but what happens when the need for financial data outpaces the ability to provide answers? The recent controversy started by a federally appointed commission that suggested the Consumer Price Index has been miscalculated for several decades may be more than just an interesting example. Could there be a parallel in education? Are the traditional regulatory reporting mechanisms using district-level data built around average per-pupil expenditures, average daily attendance, or full-time equivalents flawed? Is there a better way to account for expenditures in education? Can tracing the flow of dollars to building- and program-level decision points create a better financial management tool? Recent reform efforts that have put the emphasis on buildings that use site-based management and other decentralized models have created a need for data that traditional school district accounting departments cannot meet. When building principals, teachers, and parent councils don't know how much money they have to spend or cannot gain control of the funds flowing to their buildings, then real reform is not possible. Out of sheer frustration, a Denver teacher involved in site-based management took her own personal computer and built an understandable version of the school district budget. Tracing the Flow of Dollars A few years back, Bruce Cooper of Fordham University took a new tack when he helped a student, Robert Sarrel, with a dissertation that attempted to answer the question of how much of the total state and local per-pupil allocation actually reaches the classroom in a New York City school building. Someone not familiar with the traditional school finance practices would probably assume that this would be an easy question to answer. But in the traditional green eyeshade back room of school accounting, the data were nowhere to be found. In fact, making new assumptions, asking for new data on personnel, seeking better descriptions of functions, and so on can lead one back up the accounting trail even to the offices of green eyeshade back room state-level accounting. With no solid answer in sight, the efforts of Cooper and Sarrel nevertheless caught the attention of some national education groups. Their early reports that perhaps as little as 30% to 35% of funds could be traced to the classroom fueled interest in the original study. Those who were sure that all the remaining funds went to something called administrative bloat also saw this as a topic worthy of more study. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce became interested, and the Lilly Endowment put up some money to help perfect the questions and the process. The Chamber found eight school districts that were willing to participate in a study tracking the flow of dollars down to the buildings, and the work proceeded with little fanfare. Accepting the idea that funds should be tracked in this way was not always easy, even when a superintendent and board had agreed to work on the new accounting model. The risk that new data could shine a spotlight on district decisions was real. Taxpayers, unions, principals, and parents would have data that could translate very quickly into a public clamor. For the most part, the information gathered from the eight districts did not cause any major problems. Administrative bloat was not as evident as some critics had expected, and usually the new data led not to corruption but to more questions pointing up the need for better information. In one district, for example, two middle schools with nearly the same enrollment had quite different spending patterns - even when faculty age and placement on the salary schedule were set aside. There were no cooked books, but it was evident that a new budget management tool was needed. …

William N. Evans, Sheila E. Murray, Robert M. Schwab

No abstract is available for this record.

Donald R. Winkler, Taryn A. Rounds

No abstract is available for this record.

Priscilla Wohlstetter, Richard J. Wenning, Kerri L. Briggs

By the end of 1994, 11 states had passed legislation authorizing charter schools. Following the argument that charter schools need to be autonomous, self-governing organizations to enhance their potential for high performance, this study explores legislative conditions that promote charter school autonomy. The study applies a conceptual framework of autonomy to assess variations among state charter school policies. 7he results suggest that state policies offer different levels of autonomy and thus charter schools will vary in their ability to innovate and in their potential for high performance. Differences in autonomy across charter school laws appear to be related to state political cultures and to the state's history of decentralization reform.

Allan Odden

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Juan Prawda

No abstract is available for this record.

William H. Clune

Systemic educational policy recommends creating more ambitious instruction in schools through a centralized strategy of mandatory curriculum frameworks, high-stakes student assessments, and coordinated teacher training. This article suggests serious problems with such a strategy and recommends a decentralized alternative involving local choice of curricula, technical assistance, and professional development. Arguments for, problems with, and alternatives to the centralized strategy are examined in eight dimensions of educational policy: curriculum development, curriculum stratification, educational indicators, high-stakes examinations for students, school improvement, educational finance, educational governance, and teacher training. The article concludes with recommendations for policy and research.

Austin D. Swanson, Richard A. King

Changes in public policy with respect to governance structures require complementary changes in public policy concerning the financing of educational services. Drawing on their findings from studies in Australia, England and the USA, the authors present a framework to clarify what is happening in the restructuring of school governance and to project the implications for public policy concerning the finance of schooling. The political system is represented by a decision matrix which arrays the decisions that have to be made about financing schools (who gets what, when and how) with the primary decision makers (society, the educating profession and families). The decision‐making process is shown to be a dynamic one, causing the nature of acceptable decisions to change along with political‐economic environments and with priorities given to policy objectives. Using the model, the implications of alternative centralization/decentralization strategies for school finance policy are examined under varying circumstances.

Marlaine E. Lockheed

Decentralization policies are at the heart of education reform efforts in many countries internationally. Two important types of policies are those that: (a) remove barriers to private education; and (b) devolve authority and responsibility for schools from central level administrations to intermediate level organizations and ultimately to schools, relying more on local communities for financing, with an overall goal of improving effectiveness. While both types of policies are largely uninformed by empirical evidence regarding their impact on such education outcomes as student learning, in developing countries the evidence regarding the effects of local control is much weaker than that regarding private schools. This paper extends the literature on the impact of private education on achievement, while providing the first evidence on the impact of local control on achievement in a developing county. It analyzes data from 214 secondary schools in the Philippines to answer questions regarding: (a) the relative effectiveness of local, government and private secondary schools; and (b) the factors that account for observed differences.

Rodney J. Reed

School results for children of poverty ‐ those forced by that poverty to live in inner‐city neighbourhoods ‐generally indicate educational failure at a much higher rate than is seen for students nurtured by wealthier school districts. This failure in school severely limits chances of social and economic upward mobility, which translates into a waste of human capital for the nation's business‐industrial‐political complex, and dashed hopes, dreams and self‐esteem for the individual. Parents and concerned citizens from across socio‐economic strata, long aware of the general inadequacy of schools in poor communities, have demanded improvement, often seeking it through legal and political means. Important strategies among the various federal, state and local school reform efforts to make schooling a meaningful process for all students, and particularly the minority poor, are decentralization and citizen/parent empowerment, the focus of this chapter. The movement to decentralize school governance ‐ an effort to place control into the hands of the people being served ‐ has gained momentum and exists in some form in most large‐city school districts today. An extension of administrative decentralization, citizen/parent empowerment is seen as one of several factors, including teacher and administrator preparation, curriculum renewal, school financing, and school restructuring, vital in the improvement of schools. A look at the meaning and scope of decentralization, operationalized through citizen/parent empowerment, and its probable effectiveness in improving school outcomes indicates that, alone, it is insufficient to ensure positive academic and social performance in school.

Deborah A. Verstegen

The Reagan administration’s “New Federalism” agenda focused on redirecting national priorities and decentralizing domestic programs through budgetary policy. This research analyzes the consequences of national policy shifts occurring over the decade of the 1980s for public education. Utilizing a multimethod research design, it addresses four fundamental questions: (a) What have been the federal investments in education during the Reagan years? (b) How has the overall Department of Education (ED) budget fared over this time? (c) How have individual programs in ED been affected? (d) In sum, what fiscal changes have occurred in education during the Reagan presidency and to what extent have devolution and diminution in federal education policy been influenced by the Administration’s policies? The author finds significant shifts have occurred in federal education policy and finance during the 1980s. Tax reductions, deficit financing, dwindling productivity, and an uncertain economic outlook indirectly accomplished what could not be otherwise achieved, and set the basis for a new era in national education policy and finance well beyond the Reagan years.

James W. Guthrie

Recent U.S. economic instability has had a significant but unanticipated policy consequence for education. Unusually high rates of inflation in the late 1970s and a subsequent recession did not lead to serious erosion nationally in resources allocated for education. The decentralized manner in which education is financed in the United States and enrollment declines buffered schools and colleges more than most other social service sectors. By 1985 both K–12 grade school systems and postsecondary institutions had generally recouped financial support. However, persistent economic uncertainty fueled by continuing conditions such as high federal deficits, nagging unemployment, foreign trade imbalances, and growing overseas borrowings has evoked intensified public faith in education as a means for regaining U.S. economic vitality. Current reform efforts intended to make education more rigorous and productive are one of the outcomes.

Jim Leslie Gelbman

This study sought to examine and analyze the implementation of public policies by District 12's Community School Boards (CSB) and superintendents under the Decentralization Law of 1969. The Law did not give communities total control over the schools. It did, however, grant decentralized districts significant powers including the hiring of superintendents, principals, teachers, and school aides. With respect to curricula, the Boards in District 12 were empowered to implement and evaluate their own programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, 1965). There were, however, forces outside the schools that influenced the CSB's and the superintendents. District 12, especially the Charlotte Street area, had the highest concentration of poor people in New York City in 1970. Illiteracy, welfare, drug abuse, gang activity, fires and crime naturally had an impact on the schools. Federal and State policies, as well as Board of Education By-Laws, allowed community groups greater participation in the educational process. As a result, several community organizations financed through the Office of Economic Opportunity, demanded their share of community control over the resources allocated for the schools. The CSB, then, was not an independent entity, and, as District 12's policies clearly indicated, the improvement of the schools was incidental to the Boards' other priorities. Policy-implementation in District 12 changed through the 1970's as the Boards changed. The issue of patronage made it clear that politics, not education, dominated District 12's later School Boards. In examining the issues, the main focus was to determine the extent of community participation and control. In view of the Boards' interaction with different forces from without the schools, did the concept of decentralization allow the superintendents and the Boards in District 12 to formulate their policies for the improvement of schools? The data strongly indicated that decentralization provided District 12's residents the opportunity of participating in the educational establishment. There were no data, however, that showed any of the programs implemented by District 12's Boards significantly improved the schools. On the other hand, decentralization gave hundreds of residents jobs and gave parents the right to elect and confront their own CSB members.