Top 10 Ways To Improve Public Schools. Innovative Solutions To Help Address the Issues and Challenges Facing Most Public School Districts.

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Educational Improvement; Educational Innovation; Educational Quality; Elementary Secondary Education; Excellence in Education; Public Schools; Summative Evaluation

This report offers the top 10 challenges identified by public schools and the ways that the Texas School Performance Review (TSPR) suggests that these issues be addressed. The TSPR ensures that scarce education resources are spent in the classroom. For a TSPR review, the TSPR team is invited in for months of detailed study, during which it asks for input from administrators, principals, teachers, students, parents, and community leaders. After 7 years of studying more than 24 school districts the TSPR team formulated the following recommendations: be fair with staffing and productivity standards; get rid of piles of paper through administrative automation; make administrators into facilitators through site-based management; make sure that a sound facilities-planning process is in place; let money perform its share of work through cash and investment management; foster an efficient purchasing department by buying what is needed, when it is needed, at the best price; have a vision, develop strategic planning for reaching it, and take steps to implement the plan; make sure that all fixed assets, such as building contents, be marked, counted, and tracked; adopt clearly written and legally valid policies governing the operation of a school; and find every available dollar in various education grants. (RJM)

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ED432828