Guidance for School Improvement in a Decentralizing System:

was evaluated. The focus in this report is on decentralization, exploring how Children Achieving is strengthening schools ' capacity to make and carry out informed decisions that lead to schoolwide standards, how the new structures are working at various levels of the system, and how the school district is deciding how much and what kind of guidance to.provide the schools. The second chapter of this report describes the progress of schools in becoming effective at making the decisions necessary for substantive instructional reform. The third and fourth chapters address central administration and the new administrative structure, clusters (a high school plus its feeder middle and elementary schools), to examine their contributions to the decentralization process. Chapter 5 considers the theory of action of the Children Achieving effort and presents some recommendations for implementation. It appears that the local school councils mandated by Children Achieving and the initiative's small learning communities hav