National School Boards Association Research Articles

For Your Bookshelf …

John P. Bohley, LISW‐S, DPA, principal consultant for Boards On Course, a Monroe, Ohio‐based board development consulting firm specializing in Policy Governance®, reviews a guidebook for school boards developed by the National School Boards Association.

Do School Board Governance Best Practices Improve District Performance? Testing the Key Work of School Boards in Wisconsin

ABSTRACTThe most prominent set of school board governance best practices used in the United States is the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA’s) Key Work of School Boards. In this article, we operationalize adherence to the Key Work of School Boards with multiple survey items answered by Wisconsin school board members. Using multivariate regression models, we find that adherence to the best practices results in improved achievement in districts represented by board members who have served for five or more years. The findings support the idea that school board governance behaviors are linked to district-level academic outcomes.

From the Editorial Board

School vouchers and other programs that allow public funds be funneled private schools--sometimes called tax credits or opportunity scholarships--are part of national conversation on school reform. Recently, Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, former education secretary under George H. W. Bush, introduced legislation that would use a portion of federal education funds create scholarships for low-income so they could an accredited school of their parents' choosing. According a story in The Chattanoogan (2014), Scholarships for Kids Act would reallocate $24 billion in public school funds create 11 million scholarships of $2,100 each for K-12 living in poverty. In an article in The New York Times, Alexander explained that the simplest way for [federal funds support low-income students] is just pin them blouse or shirt of a child and let it follow child school they attend (Rich, 2014, para. 3). Alexander likened his proposal other federal assistance programs, namely Pell grants and GI Bill, although he acknowledged that vouchers have not been widely accepted at K-12 level. Voucher programs vary from state state. Currently only Washington, D.C. has a federally funded school voucher program, but 16 states have adopted some form of publicly funded school choice vouchers. On February 17, 2014 North Carolina Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood granted a preliminary injunction against state's Opportunity Scholarships program, ruling it unconstitutional. North Carolina's state constitution dictates that resources allocated public education shall be faithfully appropriated and used exclusively for establishing and maintaining a uniform system of free public (Article IX, Section 6), thereby prohibiting use of public funds for private institutions. The Louisiana Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in May 2013, ruling that statewide voucher plan violated Louisiana's state constitution. A resolution amend Alaska's constitution allow use of public monies for private schools was pulled from a floor vote in March 2014, while Tennessee, Florida, and Arizona have all introduced bills during current legislative session expand existing voucher programs. Proponents of vouchers see them as a means secure educational equity and access for low-income students, as well as those currently attending failing schools. Voucher programs provide crucial options children who too often are forced failing (Alliance for School Choice, n.d., para. 4). In some states, vouchers allow with special needs, in addition those from low-income families, private schools as a means attain improved educational opportunity. Additionally, voucher proponents believe that increasing parent choice will encourage traditional public schools improve conditions in order maintain competitiveness (Sugarman, 2013). Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal sent out an automated phone message publicizing Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs) in order to apprise parents of a unique program (Fisher, 2014, para. 7), stating that he works ensure that students are provided with excellent education opportunities (Fischer, 2014, para. 9). Opponents of vouchers claim that such programs divert funds from public schools and frequently benefit private interests (National School Boards Association, n.d.), and they are concerned that using public funds support parochial schools violates separation of church and state. Additionally, lack of accountability for private schools draws criticism, since most are not subject requisite standardized testing in public schools (Strauss, 2014). Florida's proposed voucher expansion bill was pulled by its sponsor after state senate declared that private schools utilizing vouchers would be required administer state tests their (Kennedy, 2014). …

Allergy/Anaphylaxis Management in the School Setting

It is the position of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) that the safe and effective management of allergies and anaphylaxis in schools requires a collaborative, multidisciplinary team approach. The registered professional school nurse (hereinafter referred to as the school nurse) is the leader in a comprehensive management approach that includes planning and coordination of care, educating staff, providing a safe environment, and ensuring prompt emergency response should exposure to a life-threatening allergen occur. Furthermore, NASN supports, in states where laws and regulations allow, the maintenance of stock nonpatient-specific epinephrine and physician-standing orders for school nurses to administer epinephrine in life-threatening situations in the school setting. School districts must have a clear, concise, all-inclusive policy in place to address the management of allergies in the school setting that should be reviewed annually (National School Boards Association [NSBA], 2012). This policy shall be consistent with federal and state laws, nursing practice standards, and established safe practices in accordance with evidence-based information and include development of a developmentally appropriate Individualized Healthcare Plan (IHP) and Emergency Care Plan (ECP).

Teaching Content and Skills through Integrated Literacy Circles

The professional literature abounds with discussions of the need to integrate reading skills with content area instruction (Blanton, Wood, & Taylor, 2007; Gavelek, Raphael, Biondo, & Wang, 2000; Moje, 2007; Jordan, Jensen, & Greenleaf, 2001; Wood & Blanton, 2009s; Wood & Muth, 1991). To this end, national organizations (International Reading Association and National Middle School Association, 2001; National School Board Association, 2006), state curriculum standards (Bacevich & Salinger, 2006) and national reports (Hubbard, Mehan & Stein, 2006; Heller G Kirsch, Braun, Sum, & Yamamoto, 2007) advocate the value of integrated instruction as a necessary means of learning required subject area knowledge and concepts. Actually enacting this integrative process is yet another matter. Consider the dialogue in the two different classroom scenarios illustrated in Figure 1. In Classroom A, the teacher tells the class in advance the meaning of the unknown word by citing a dictionary definition. Then, after the students have read the paragraph silently, the teacher asks the students a series of literal level, text-based questions about the passage content. To conclude the lesson, the teacher recites what the students should now know about the information in the passage. The teacher in this scenario attempts to teach the content of the lesson without helping students understand the language of the passage and how to read and fully understand the meaning of the passage. At no time are students asked to refer back to the passage for confirmation, and the entire lesson is dominated by teacher talk. In Classroom B, the teacher has already pre-assigned the students to groups and tells them to use imagery to visualize the environment and farm life reflected in the paragraph. With their minds actively engaged in the text, the teacher uses a line of questioning and probing to help them understand the meaning of the target word, subsistence, continually referring them back to the paragraph to find support for their answers. For closure, the students work in groups to review the content learned in the lesson. Expanding the vocabulary portion of the lesson further, the teacher asks group members to think of or locate more words with similar word parts. This scenario illustrates a combination of teacher and student contributions using both small-group and whole-class formats. In other words, the teacher is teaching both the content of the lesson and how to read that content. We maintain that developing an awareness of the skills and tasks involved in proficient reading is necessary in the middle grades and that success with these skills and tasks develops through peer interaction and meaningful activity, not through teacher-dominated discussion. To that end, in this column we introduce the integrated literacy circle (Blanton, Pilonieta & Wood, 2007), a discussion-based approach to teaching and learning content area concepts while simultaneously acquiring basic reading skills. We illustrate how a teacher facilitates this approach using excerpts from transcripts of two lessons that were taught in middle school classrooms. The first lesson was designed to help students identify cause and effect in a social studies passage, and the second lesson taught students to recognize and use context clues to identify obstacle words in a science lesson. However, note that integrated literacy circles can be used to teach and reinforce students' understanding of any of the necessary literacy skills and tasks including predicting, sequencing, summarizing, skimming for main ideas, inferring, critical analysis, and text structure. Defining the integrated literacy circle concept An integrated literacy circle is a way for students to learn, apply, organize, and coordinate the skills and strategies needed for proficient reading. This concept is very similar to the reading circles prevalent in many elementary classrooms, where students are assigned to groups for a particular instructional purpose. …

Learn from Education's Experience

Free-market economists should be in hiding, considering the havoc their theories caused when put into practice. What is really ironic is that the education sector could have been the canary in the mine, if anyone had cared to notice. Beginning in the 1950s, the guru of free-market economics, the late Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, warned against a government-run education system. Government should have a minimal role in a free market, he maintained. His ideas about privatization and deregulation influenced economies around the world, including those of President Ronald Reagan and England's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In education, this meant that parents should have absolute choice of where to send their children to school. Individual choice, not common good, was the mantra for the market economy applied to schools. The voucher was the epitome of free choice in schools. Moreover, free marketers said vouchers would improve all schools because traditional public schools would have to compete for students. Then-Secretary of Education William Bennett once proposed turning Title I into a voucher program. No one beyond a few hyper-fanatics took the proposal seriously. Yet, vouchers for parents--and lesser versions of parent choice, such as charters--have been a background theme in policy discussions for at least 25 years. When the market theorists turned to laws as a stand-in for vouchers, they sometimes characterized legislation as either good or bad. The good laws allowed schools to spring up with little or no regulation or guarantees for parents or the taxpayers who were funding the schools. State officials in Arizona bragged about being the charter state because dozens of schools had been started, some in open fields and none with safety regulations or accountability. Many failed completely, and today many are still failing their students. Arizona has one-sixth of the nation's schools, but according to Gene Glass, professor at Arizona State University, they are labeled underperforming on tests at almost twice the rate of regular public schools. Parental choice was written into the No Child Left Behind Act. Its first intervention allows parents to flee underperforming schools; the second gives parents a choice of supplementary tutoring services. Neither has been very successful. Options for parents under the first intervention are limited, and feedback from hearings on NCLB in 10 states indicated that parents and students wanted their own schools to improve, not to move to other schools. As far as supplementary education services are concerned, for-profit companies have offered ineffectual tutoring that is not integrated with classroom work. Definitive studies of supplementary education services, which I hope are under way, ought to tell us more. Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives took up the voucher idea at a national level in 2004 when it created the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which awards scholarships of up to $7,500 a year to low-income children for tuition and other fees at participating private schools. In 2003, Anne Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association, pointed out the hypocrisy of the action. NCLB is full of accountability measures, she said, but not so the voucher plan. …

Is Literacy Lagging?

SEVERAL reports lately have implied that students are not ready for college and that colleges are going downhill in part because they are more interested in money and prestige than in the quality and preparation of their students. The tribulations of colleges have been the subject of a PBS special by John Merrow, Declining by Degrees, and one of his podcasts, Slipping Behind. But few days go by without a report on the tremendous debt that students incur in trying to get a college diploma and the negative impact that this burden has on their university careers--less focus on academics, more hours devoted to working at a job, and so more years to get to the diploma and an increased probability of never getting one at all. In the November column, I discussed research indicating that the bachelor's degree was in danger of becoming a rich-kidsonly birthright. Another report claiming that high schools don't prepare students well comes from the ACT. Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals About College Readiness in Reading is written in the language of fear and gives its findings a negative spin. Although the overall report is titled neutrally, its first chapter is headed Our Students Are not Ready for College and Workplace Reading. As an example of the negative emphasis, consider that the ACT report presents a pie chart with the legend More than Two-Thirds of New Jobs Require Some Postsecondary Education. The figure is 67%. The chart could just as well have been labeled More than Two-Thirds of New Jobs Do Not Require a College Degree. Sixty-nine percent fit that statement. The report claims, It is recognized today that the knowledge and skills needed for college are equivalent to those needed in the workplace. The only citations for this contention are a publication of the American Diploma Project, whose integrity I question (alas, many citations in the report are also from individuals and organizations that fall into this category), and an essay by Patte Barth (then with the Education Trust, now with the National School Boards Association) in which she contends, with no real data, that the two are converging. However, in an article last October, New York Times reporter Louis Uchitelle found that a substantial proportion of people holding certain jobs that do not require college e.g., office clerks, derrick operators, and theater ushers) nevertheless have bachelor's degrees. Conversely, Uchitelle quotes MIT economist David Autor: There has been enormous demand for low-skilled workers. Uchitelle also reports that since 2000 the weekly pay of workers with a high school education has risen at four times the rate of those with college degrees. Uchitelle concluded, Clearly there are more college graduates than unfilled jobs requiring their credentials. As a consequence of the surplus, some employers have upgraded their job requirements. Actually, reading in the workplace is apt to be harder than assigned reading in college. The memos and directives one gets to read on the job are often unreadable, while the materials one encounters in literature classes are not. (Ninth-graders slogging through Silas Marner might not agree.) The principal datum in the ACT report is a trend line for ACT's reading showing that readiness for college-level reading is at its lowest point in more than a decade. Only 51% score high enough to meet the Benchmark, which is the equivalent of a score of 21 on the ACT reading test. A comparison of students' college grades and their scores on the ACT test finds that reaching the Benchmark gives a student a 50% chance of making a B or better and a 75% chance of making a C or better in a credit-bearing college course such as U.S. history or psychology. ACT's own data, though, showed that 68% of those who failed to make the Benchmark still received a C or better in psychology, while 64% attained a C or better in U. …

“Yes, but …”: Education Leaders Discuss Social Justice

This article presents answers to the question: What do powerful educational leaders think about training practitioners for social justice? The data are drawn from interviews with a former governor and leaders from the American Association of School Administration (AASA), National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the National School Boards Association, the Council of Chief State School Officers the National Association of State Boards of Education, and others. Respondents noted that social justice issues must be addressed but barriers exist, including that administrators are stressed; the topic is considered too controversial by many; and dominant societal values are barriers. Respondents provided specific advice about training, such as: using policy levers like No Child Left Behind as motivators; start with “the higher calling”; be ethically appealing; put social justice requirements in licensure policy; use coalitions; and write articles in plain language for practitioners. Respondents’ advice can be used to construct good leadership preparation and, ultimately, can lead to a reconstruction of leadership.

The Occurrence of Behaviors Associated With Sixteen Character Values

The authors describe a process for measuring behaviors associated with 16 character values. Using the process described in the article, school officials and counselors can determine character values to target and can determine from scores generated by the instrument if their efforts have resulted in improved behaviors associated with the targeted character values.

Implications of Mandatory National Technology Competencies for Professional Preparation in Health Education

As technological literacy increasingly becomes necessary to access and communicate health-related information, instructional technology competency standards for educators, including health educators, are needed to ensure compliance with professional development goals and guidelines. This article examines proposed recommendations by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education, the International Society for Technology in Education, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology, the International Technology Education Association, the National School Board Association, and other recognized educational organizations. The concept of technological competence as related to the National Health Standards Project and current status of health education is explored, with areas in need of further research or development identified.

The Convention: Should We Practice What We Preach?

L ong Beach was our 78th convention. We experienced stimulating general sessions, and numerous, informative concurrent sessions. The technology in support of presentations has advanced with sophisticated computer-based software that allows for convenient multimedia uses. Presenters made effective use of these communication techniques. As I sat in concurrent session, I thought back to my first AECT convention in 1952. There were general sessions and many concurrent sessions then also, with audiovisuals used in most presentations. At that time, overhead transparencies often called "vugraphs," were commonly prepared by writing on clear acetate sheets with felt pens; also 2" by 2" slides and 16ram film clips were shown by speakers. In each session, the audience sat, listened, took notes (few handouts were used), and sometimes had the opportunity to ask questions. As now, the attendees "networked" (a meaningless word in '52) among themselves. We left the convention generally pleased with what we had seen, heard, and learned, including useful information at the trade show. While the technology has appreciably changed in these 48 years, I noted that the convention format remains practically the same. These questions came to mind: 9 Are our convention programs doing a better job for attendees today? 9 Do we conveniently provide for individuals' varying interest levels and session content knowledge ? 9 Could we be using more of our knowledge about effective ways to communicate, allowing more flexibility for attendees to acquire desired information, encouraging greater interaction, and in other ways better serving the way adults prefer to engage in convention activities? 9 Could we not apply some of the ideas we are fostering for training and education in our professional work-l ike a flexible approach through self-directed activities for acquiring information on a convention topic, followed by small group meeting with a presenter? 9 Would it even be sensible to explore some versions of "distance learning" for orientation purposes and even some presentations by using the convention hotels' closed-circuit television facilities? Relate these questions to what goes on during a convention. According to the schedule, each attendee must choose which concurrent session to attend, sometimes from among up to 20 sessions offered at the same time. Difficult decisions for anyone. Also, when having to attend a committee meeting, one would miss an important session. Then when we see a person leave a session is it a lack of interest, the desire to attend another session, or an appointment. Other individuals may come into a session late and miss the introduction and important information. Then there are those who want to talk with the speaker at the end of the session, but may not be able to do so because of their tight schedule. I was first concerned with these matters back in 1972 when I was AECT's president. I asked myself, "Must we adhere to the traditional theatre-style room arrangement with only sit-listen-watch in concurrent sessions." With a colleague at that time, Art Suchesk, we tried a new approach. One day we set up numerous self-study carrels using audiotape, slide/tape, filmstrip/tape, video, and even some primitive response system program presentations, with which attendees, individually or in small groups, on their own selected time, could acquire information on a topic. Then they would meet with the program presenter at a scheduled time for discussion. We communicated with all interested presenters for their preparation of necessary study materials and then arranged for the equipment and duplicate copies of their media resources. Admittedly, at that time this wasn't an easy program segment to arrange and offer. We had wonderful cooperation from trade show vendors and graduate students and the local university. The attendees evaluated this innovative convention feature very favorably. But after '72, no following convention picked up on this approach. It certainly makes me think of many new ideas I observed or experienced during my career, that faded for any of several reasons. With the remarkable equipment and software we have access to today, might not forthcoming convention programmers consider innovating parts of the program, just as we are striving to transform training and educational programs in our professional activities? This could be a great leadership opportunity for educational technologists. Remember, we will be meeting with the National School Board Association in October and could create a favorable impression. What do you think?

Promoting Implementation of CDC Guidelines for Schools on Promoting Healthy Easting

Ihe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is developing resources to help schools implement the best practices recommendations of CDC's guidelines for school health programs to promote lifelong healthy eating among young people. This presentation will describe four new resources that will be available in late 1999.The School Health Index: A Self-Assessment and Planning Tool is a questionnaire that enables schools to measure the extent to which their physical activity and nutrition policies and practices comply with CDC guidelines. The planning and resource sections will help schools document their successes and create action plans for improvement. Road Map to the Guidelines: An On-line Guide to Resources will link users to detailed technical assistance resources that can facilitate implementation of specific CDC guidelines recommendations.CDC is working with the National Association of State Boards of Education to develop a school health policy guide with a special focus on nutrition and physical activity. The guide will suggest specific policy language, present policy options, showcase exemplary policies, and offer practical solutions for implementation. CDC has helped the National School Boards Association develop a School Health Policy Database and Technical Assistance Service that disseminates sample school district policies and up-to-date information on policy topics, and provides consultation on policy issues.

Family Structure, Schoolmates, and Racial Inequalities in School Achievement

This study examines the influence of schoolmate family structure, racial concentration, and socioeconomic status on the academic achievement of individual African American and White students. The data are drawn from the 1990 test results of 18,000 10th graders who took the Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination. The study finds that being surrounded by schoolmates from female-headed families had the second largest negative association with the academic achievement of African Americans, greater in effect than the association of academic achievement with individual family structure. It appears that the negative effect of concentrations of African Americans in schools may be largely attributed to the association of minority concentration schools with high percentages of female-headed families. Key Words: academic achievement African Americans family struture, two-parent families, mothers. Despite a narrowing of the gap in educational attainment between African American children and White children, there are still disturbing inequalities in the educational outcomes of the two major racial groups in the United States. According to a 1994 report of the U.S. Department of Education, African Americans are at a disadvantage in preschool attendance, grade retention, academic achievement, dropout rates, parental involvement, school climate, course-taking patterns, educational aspirations, labor market outcomes, and adult literacy patterns (p. 9). Not only do African American and White children have unequal outcomes from their school years, they often spend these years in different educational and familial environments. According to the National School Boards Association, about two thirds of African American school children were attending segregated schools in the 1990s (Orfield & Monfort, 1992). African American students are more likely to report that they feel unsafe in their schools, that their learning is disrupted by other students, and that they have problems getting along with teachers (U. S. Department of Education, 1994, p. 11). Finally, the majority (65%) of African Americans in 1990 who were younger than 18 years old lived in single-parent households, but the majority (76%) of White minors lived in households with two parents (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1992). Thus, African American children tend to go to segregated schools with disruptive and unsafe environments, and the majority of them are in singleparent households. If single-parent households, which are overwhelmingly headed by women, characterize the background of students in schools where African Americans predominate and if the social environments of African American schools inhibit educational excellence, then it seems reasonable to hypothesize that students from singleparent households somehow are producing social environments in schools with minority concentrations that prevent young minority members from fully realizing their capabilities. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In the mid-1960s, Coleman and his associates (1966) provided support for the view that schoolmates play an important part in shaping the education of young people. Studies of the academic achievement of minority children generally have provided evidence that these children do better in racially mixed schools. (See, for example, results of the studies of the influences of desegregation on achievement in Bankston & Caldas, 1996; Bridge, Judd, & Moock, 1979.) Coleman attributed racial differences in achievement to socioeconomic differences between the races. Because schools that are predominantly White tend to contain students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, Coleman expected schools with majority White populations to be beneficial for minority children. Studies, however, have found that the concentration of African American young people in schools has a negative effect on achievement, independent of socioeconomic status (Bankston & Caldas, 1996; Caldas & Bankston, 1997; Rumberger & Willms, 1992). …

Health education curricula in residential schools for the deaf.

The purpose of the present study was to determine the extent to which comprehensive (K-12) school health education was required. Permission to modify survey questions from the American School Health Association and the National School Board Association was obtained. As part of a larger study, ten items of the questionnaire were used to identify the status of health education in residential schools for the deaf. The questionnaire was mailed to institutions listed in a Reference Issue of the American Annals of the Deaf. Twenty-five institutions responded and results were tabulated using descriptive statistics. Twenty-two (88%) of the responding schools indicated a comprehensive health instruction program was in place, with 60% of respondents had specified time requirement for health instruction. The majority of responding institutions reported that teachers responsible for teaching the health curriculum to the deaf were not required to be certified in health education. Health education certification for educators of the deaf would assist in upgrading the quality of health education in residential schools for the deaf.

Books in brief

Raising Our Sights: Improving U.S. Achievement in Mathematics and Science John O'Neil for the ASCD Panel on U.S. Achievement in Mathematics and Science Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) 1991 40 pp. $6.50 Ready to Learn: Early Childhood Education and the Public Schools National School Boards Association (NSBA) 1990 48 pp. Developing and Supporting Teachers for Science Education in the Middle Years The National Center for improving Science Education 1990 86 pp.

Are educators ready for reform?A response to the critics

In this rejoinder, we respond to the reactions provided by Thomas Andre, Donald Beggs, Robert Brown, Susan Hegland, Kenneth Henson, Theodore Kowalski, Richard Lathrop, Phyllis Maslow, Royce Ronning, James Schnurr, John Sikula, and John Surber. In addition, we present findings based on data collected from three additional national samples; The National School Board Association (NSBA), the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), as well as teachers who were in the NASSP sample. Finally, we draw conclusions from our data-collection efforts and from reactions given by the scholars listed above to make suggestions about which kinds of reforms educators are ready to implement.

The diffusion of school-based tobacco-use prevention programs: project description and baseline data

Introduction Evaluation studies indicate that school-based smoking prevention programs can be effective in preventing the initiation of smoking by adolescents. However, the potential impact of these programs has been limited because few schools use programs which have been shown to be effective. Efforts to increase adoption of these programs by schools are needed. This paper presents the rationale, theoretical basis, intervention strategies and initial findings from one of two federally funded studies to develop and evaluate interventions to enhance the diffusion of tested prevention programs. Survey results at baseline indicate that school administrators and teachers have a high receptivity for adopting a tobacco-use prevention program, but the reported use of evaluated curricula was low. The majority of school districts develop their own teaching programs which may not contain important elements of successfully evaluated programs. Most school districts had smoking policies, but few applied restrictions to groups other than students. These data and other conditions indicate a supportive climate as well as the need to develop and evaluate strategies to encourage the diffusion of tobacco-use prevention programs. Center for Health Promotion Research and Development School of Public Health, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, PO Box 20186 and 'The University of Texas M.D.Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX 77225, USA Currently, Vice President for Health Promotion Programs, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Menlo Park, CA, USA National priorities and objectives for health promotion and disease prevention have been clearly established (USDHEW, 1979; USDHHS, 1980, 1986). To pursue these objectives, many risk reduction and disease prevention interventions have been developed, implemented, and their effectiveness evaluated through research and demonstration programs. Unfortunately, the diffusion of programs beyond the demonstration sites is often slow. As a consequence, the potential for significant public health benefit is lost. This situation is particularly evident for programs aimed at preventing the use of tobacco among adolescents. Schools are the logical site in which to conduct tobacco-use prevention programs. Nearly 95% of all children and youth are in elementary or secondary schools (Iverson and Kolbe, 1983), and most schools either mandate or endorse school health education (Kolbe and Iverson, 1984). Many of these programs include tobacco as an integral component. The National School Board Association (1987) estimates that anti-smoking education programs are part of the curriculum in the majority of school districts in the country and are present in nearly two-thirds of middle and junior high schools. The 1987 School Health in America Study found that 20 states (40%) mandate tobacco-use prevention education and that 22 states (44%) have a law or regulation that restricts smoking in public schools (Lovato et al., 1989). Unfortunately, many school-based smoking prevention efforts often are didactic, one-shot efforts, are not integral to the curriculum or to school policies, and do not reflect state-of-the-art behavior change strategies. © IRL Press 111 by gest on A ril 2, 2011 her.oxjournals.org D ow nladed fom

The Knapp School Libraries Proj ect

only provide incentive for reading and educational growth, but which encourage cultivation of taste for the best in literature. Just as new techniques and an ever-broadening range of materials have become available, the responsi bilities and the roles of the members of the instructional staff have grown, and the scope of the library, as meas ured in its collection and its services to the instructional program, has been enlarged. The concept of the library as a center for instructional materials is no innovation, but con centrated, large-scale effort to accom plish its conversion to an instructional materials center is fairly recent. A major impetus for this conversion has come from the Standards for School Library Programs published by the American Library Association in 1960, which is a statement of quantitative and qualitative stand ards for library programs in elemen tary and secondary schools. In addition to the committee of the American Association of School Li brarians, which drafted the stand ards, representatives of twenty groups, such as the Department of Audio-Visual Instruction of the Na tional Education Association, the National School Boards Association, and the National Citizens Council for

Tip on books

Bardash, Jack. The Labor Movement in the United States. New York: Public Affairs Committee, Inc., 1958. American Association of School Administrators. Roles, Responsibilities, Relationships of the School Board, Superintendent, and Staff. Washington, D.C.: the Association, 1963. California Association of Secondary School Administrators. Teacher‐Administrator Relations in a Negotiations Setting. Burlingame, California: the Association, 1965. Kratzmann, Arthur. “The Alberta Teachers’ Association: A Prototype for the American Scene?” Administrator's Notebook, October, 1963, 12, 1–4. National Education Association. Guidelines for Professional Negotiation. Washington, D.C.: the Association, 1963. National Education Association. Guidelines for Professional Sanctions. Washington, D.C.: the Association, 1963. National Education Association. Oklahoma — A State‐Wide Study of Conditions Detrimental to an Effective Public Educational Program. Washington, D.C.: the Association, February, 1965. National Education Association. Professional Negotiation: Selected Statements of School Board, Administrator, Teacher Relationships. Washington, D.C.: the Association, February, 1964. National Education Association. Utah—A State‐Wide Study of School Conditions. Washington, D.C.: the Association, March, 1964. National School Boards Association. A Report and Source Book on: Board‐Administrator‐Teacher Relations; Providing Equal Education Opportunity, Long Range Goals of NSBA, Delegate Assembly Workshop of NSBA. Evanston, Illinois: the Association, April, 1964. New Jersey State Federation District Boards of Education. The Need for Balance—A Second Report on Board‐Superintendent‐Staff Relation‐skips. Trenton, New Jersey: the Federation, February, 1965. Steffensen, James P. Teachers Negotiate with Their School Boards. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1964. United Federation of Teachers. Agreement between the Board of Education of the City of New York and United Federation of Teachers, Local 2, American Federation of Teachers, AFL‐CIO, Covering Classroom Teachers, July 1, 1963‐June 30, 1965. New York: American Federation of Teachers, 1963.