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Introduction Schools regularly initiate new programs that have the potential to address perceived curricular, administrative or social problems. On the whole, however, the research record shows that most of those programs do not experience long-term endurance. Our level of knowledge about what makes some educational programs succeed while many others fall has been greatly expanded over the years, but it still is continuously being elaborated upon by new studies and new findings about the inner workings of change. To explore further how some of those factors might apply to school-initiated improvement efforts, a comprehensive review of 39 local school improvement efforts, all initiated during the 1980s, was done to determine how many were still viable and how many had expired, as well as the specific situations that had been most responsible for determining program fate. Of particular interest was how conditions might have impacted differently upon programs initiated at the beginning of the 1980s and those initiated at the end of the decade, and the implications of the findings for other systems initiating similar reform efforts. The programs of interest were all initiated with external federal funding allocated by the state as seed money under the Developmental Grant Component of the ESEA Chapter 2 Program for the development and dissemination of new curriculum-related program services and materials. They reflect a diversity of practices and policies: some were created to alter classroom teaching practices and others to create or modify administrative or organizational policies; some were implemented by only one school and others by an entire district. The diversity of the reform efforts is paralleled by a diversity in success outcomes: although most have not endured, some have managed to endure and a few have even become institutionalized into the standard academic program of the district. But what is it that distinguished the more successful programs from the less successful and unsuccessful ones? What facilitated endurance of some change efforts while so many others failed? The histories of the 39 change efforts initiated during the decade of the 1980s will be summarized and analyzed here from the perspectives of the teachers, principals, and higher-level administrators who implemented the changes. Findings are interpreted within the framework of what is known about the processes of change to yield insights useful for the teacher or administrator contemplating the initiation of a school change effort. Analysis of the change efforts The 39 programs studied here were selected on the basis of their timing as well as their funding source: the early efforts, of which there are 26, were all initiated and funded during 1982-84 and the 13 late-decade efforts all began during 1988-1990. The second group of programs was selected as a comparison with the first because they occurred at the end of the same decade, and hence did not overlap at all with the first group of programs, and because enough time has now passed to provide some idea of which of them will endure and which will not. Each of the programs was examined from three approaches. First, all original and current program participants were contracted and interviewed for their perspectives. This included project directors, teachers, principals, district-level academic specialists and administrators who had supervised projects, state-level administrators who had initiated and/or supervised projects, and external consultants (e.g., university faculty) who provided leadership, inservice training, or evaluation services to a project. In addition, all past and present project files were examined for information relating to the original project description and proposal for funding, quarterly and annual reports of current progress and expenditures, evaluation reports (where available) detailing project successes and failures, and any published products such as manuals or curriculum guides. …
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