Gwent Reviews Its Needs
Gwent Education Authority systematically evaluates its policies, procedures, administration and the financial arrangements for young people with special educational needs. Julien Kramer, director of education, London Borough of Greenwich, until recently divisional director of education, School Support and Finance, Gwent, who has been working with service partners, the voluntary bodies and the district auditor, highlights strengths and weaknesses in service arrangements in Gwent and sets an agenda for change in anticipation of the requirements of the 1993 Education Act.
Restructuring Reform: choice and change in special education
Steve Rayner, Lecturer in Special Education in the School of Education at The University of Birmingham and formerly head of a residential school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties, argues for a proactive response to educational reform in the management of special education. The action of choice and change is perceived as not only necessary for institutional survival but also as an opportunity for educational renewal and a revised definition of special educational need.
Reforming special education : policy implementation from state level to street level
Focusing on Massachusetts' innovative special education reform law, Chapter 766, "Reforming Special Education" traces the complex processes through which an ostensibly universalistic and equitable policy can produce a biased distribution of public benefits favoring affluent clients."Reforming Special Education" examines three Massachusetts school systems and seven schools within those systems to determine whether laws formulated to alter practices in educating children who are deaf, blind, retarded, and physically handicapped actually result in fair and uniform treatment of children with special needs, or whether they just create more work for school personnel.The book discusses individual and community wealth as factors in the allocation of funds. Despite Massachusetts' "equalizing formula," it points out that rich districts often fare better than poor ones because they have the resources and sophistication necessary to challenge funding decisions. The book also reveals that bureaucrats who are charged with carrying out the changes are victimized by new laws which, for lack of resources, they cannot hope to put into effect. Because the street-level bureaucrats, front-line personnel, develop informal means of coping with these problems and with their jobs, they distort the policy they are charged with implementing and become policy makers in their own right.Weatherley concludes that policy initiatives must take into account potential effects on the daily work routines of those charged with implementing them. These findings have dramatic implications for all human service bureaucracies where front-line staff interact with the public--hospitals, police departments, public welfare and employment offices, mental health centers and lower courts. Students of public policy, educators, social workers, or anyone involved in public service employment will find this a scholarly, yet highly readable account of the organizational constraints to bureaucratic reform.