Guidelines for the planning and implementation of cooperatives in rural and small community schools: An alternative for expanding opportunity for excellence and equity in education

The problem of providing quality programming in the public schools of Illinois was accelerated through the General Assembly's Reform Act in 1985. The question of how to improve quality and expand opportunities through developing cooperatives between schools as an alternative to consolidation is the project's central theme. The central focus is on how the educational service centers and intermediate state agencies can assist small schools in managing school improvement issues most effectively by sharing resources on an interdistrict basis in order to improve the quality and academic opportunities for all students enrolled in their districts. Fundamentally, the goal was to establish consolidation of program planning and implementation practices via cooperation between districts without dissolving physical district boundaries.Selected areas of research in change served as a resource for choosing project appropriate change strategies in the development of guidelines designed to specifically couple change processes to school improvement programs. Within the context of this project, four separate categories of influence were considered for guideline development: (a) general overview about the nature of educational change, (b) processes relative to organizing educational change, (c) processes related to effective change facilitator behavior, and (d) processes aligned with effectively managing educational leadership behaviors for planning and supporting school improvement at the local level.Information from four sources--administrator perception survey, needs assessment survey, regional demographics, and Illinois state report card--were used to assess current status and identify commonalities that exist between districts in the study. The application of a variety of descriptive and inferential statistical measures, coupled with appropriate analysis, clearly demonstrated the existence of many common features between the 12 schools in this case study.Furthermore, the study's conclusion as a result of establishing and implementing five separate cooperative projects supports the notion that educational service centers are in a position both politically and programmatically to provide legitimate assistance to rural and small community schools. The agency, by design, can reduce the perceived large school advantage by providing direct services through coordinating shared resources among and between schools that may have an equalizing effect across all districts in the state.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio