Introduction

National attention is focused on education reform as more state and local education agencies adopt challenging content and performance standards for students, decide how to restructure the school day, and begin to involve parents in all aspects of their children's education.

These efforts have expanded significantly since the 1994 passage of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. Under Goals 2000, states develop education improvement plans that include "strategies for ensuring that comprehensive, systemic reform is promoted from the bottom up in communities, local educational associations, and schools, as well as guided by coordination and facilitation from State leaders" (section 306).

This study asked nationally representative samples of public school principals and teachers about their use of content standards and performance standards and other reform strategies, ties between the school and home, the role of the Title I program in supporting reform, and what information they need to help them move ahead with reform.

This report presents the findings of the principal survey, called the Public School Survey on Education Reform; a subsequent report, called Status of Education Reform in Public Elementary and Secondary Schools: Teachers' Perspectives, will summarize results from the teacher survey. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) will use this information to see how principals and teachers view reform and reform efforts. Findings from parallel surveys of school districts and states are reported in Reports on Reform from the Field: District and State Survey Results.

This report contains information about reform efforts in schools reported by school principals through a mail survey. The information has not been objectively measured or independently verified. Because of the survey questions and collection methodology used, results should be interpreted carefully. Principals may have overreported their involvement in reform for the following reasons:

1. Since all principals do not share the same concept of reform, survey questions were designed to be inclusive of a wide variety of activities.



2. The reporting of reform activities has strong demand characteristics--meaning that principals know that their schools should be engaged in these activities.



3. As a Fast Response survey, the questionnaire was brief and could not collect information to judge the accuracy of the principals' reports about their reform efforts.

Principals were given guidance while completing their surveys in the form of general definitions of reform and standards. Comprehensive reform was defined on the questionnaire as "efforts to improve education for all students by establishing high content and performance standards and redesigning the various components of the education system in a coordinated and coherent fashion to support students learning to the standards." High standards were defined as "recent and current education reform activities that seek to establish more challenging expectations for student achievement and performance, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards for math, state- or local-initiated standards in various subjects, and those outlined in Goals 2000." Further, "standards go beyond general expectations for student learning in that they are written, may be externally developed, and are to be applied uniformly by all teachers." Note that the survey did not limit standards to those adopted by states, since schools in states that have not adopted standards could have locally-developed standards of their own.

These data were requested by ED's Planning and Evaluation Service (PES) to provide descriptive information about reform, principals' needs for information and assistance, and the role of Title I program resources in supporting education reform. This study is part of a larger national assessment of the Title I program. Other parts of the assessment use methodologies such as site visits to collect additional detail and to verify school activities.

The study was conducted during the spring of 1996 (with followup through July of that year) by the Fast Response Survey System (FRSS) for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) by Westat, Inc., a research firm in Rockville, Maryland. The survey asked principals to report for the 1995-96 school year.

The questionnaires were sent to 1,360 principals of a nationally representative sample of U.S. public schools (see appendix A for survey methodology). The survey requested information about the following issues:

• Use of content standards to guide curriculum and instruction;



• Strategies to support comprehensive reform;



• Barriers to the application of high standards to all students;



• Methods of informing parents about the school's expectations for student learning;



• Sources of information and assistance in using and understanding reform strategies and activities;



• Groups with influence over decisions related to reform; and



• Understanding of new Title I program provisions supporting reform.

Survey findings are presented for all schools, and frequently by the following school characteristics:

• Instructional level (elementary school, middle school, high school);



• Locale of school (city, urban fringe, town, rural);



• Percent of students in the school eligible for free or reducedprice lunches through the National School Lunch Program (42 USC 1758 (f)(2)) (less than 35 percent, 35-49 percent, 50-74 percent, 75 percent or more) by instructional level; and



• Title I funding (no Title I, Title I nonschoolwide program, Title I schoolwide program) by instructional level.

Appendix B contains reference tables of the survey data broken out by the four school characteristics. These tables were included in the report because many of the comparisons between types of schools on the extent of their reform activities did not show the substantively interesting or statistically significant differences that were anticipated. Readers can refer to the tables in appendix B to view comparisons not cited in the text of this report.

Data have been weighted to provide national estimates of public schools. All comparative statements made in this report have been tested for statistical significance though chi-square tests or t-tests adjusted for multiple comparisons using the Bonferroni adjustment and are significant at the 0.05 level or better. However, not all statistically significant comparisons have been presented. It should be noted that the estimates for elementary schools with between 35 and 49 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunches are based on a relatively small number of unweighted cases (39) (appendix table A-1).

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