This article confronts the question of the proper place of authority in the administration of educational policy and practice in public schools.

A call to consider assertive forms of school leadership.

The author presents an overview of the dropout problem, pointing out that what is really a diverse set of problems requires multiple approaches.

Discussion of Impact II, a program to improve teaching through teacher-to-teacher networks and development and dissemination grants.

The problem of youth unemployment in the state of New York is explored in a study which begins with a general review of the sociodemographic features of the target population. Other topics include: work experience and education, attitudes toward work, job entry and career ladder jobs, and unemployment among minority youth.

The author examines the paradox of how federal purposes (to bring change both to those who do and don't welcome it) can be reconciled with a user-driven system (a system that maximizes user self-determination). Design specifications for effective change strategies are suggested.

In this chapter the limits of participation and representation as control devices are stressed, especially from the point of view of the individual citizen. The barriers that keep an individual from realizing effective control are emphasized in part because so much of the drive for citizen involvement in educational matters springs from intensely personal (parental) interests and in part because recent expectations for more responsive schools have been premised on a model of policy outputs matched to individual demands. Participation, representation, and control recur throughout the politics of education. In this chapter we look briefly at the traditional question Of who controls the schools, then at some of the forms of participation, and then at representation. A concluding section returns to the overall concern with school control.

This article discusses how partisan mutual adaptation developed when efforts were made to change the existing authority system in classrooms and schools in the Rand Corporation's study of federal change-agent programs.

The author attempts to apply some standards for political representation to a specific school-community involvement mechanism. It is hoped that the exploratory results reported here will stimulate more empirical research and more democratic practice.