Coordinating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies for Educational Reform

Abstract

Neither top-down nor bottom-up strategies for educational reform work. What is required is a more sophisticated blend of the two. In this paper I examine the problem in three ways. First, I review briefly some evidence that corroborates the proposition that neither centralized nor decentralized change strategies work. Second, I present the conceptional and empirical case that a blend of the two strategies is essential. Finally, I consider two levels of the problem school-district, and school/district-state to illustrate how simultaneous centralized-decentralized forces can be combined for more effective results. Thus, centralized and decentralized are relative terms that can be applied at any two adjacent levels of hierarchical systems.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 163 citations exist upstream.