Abstract
One of the major linkages that affected the course of the ES process of change was the relationship between the federal sponsoring agency (The National Institute of Education during all but the very early months of the program) and the local, rural school districts. The variety of targeted federal programs intended to stimulate change and improve the quality of local services has multiplied in the last two decades, particularly in the educational sphere (Bailey & Mosher, 1968; Reagen, 1972). Examining the federal-local relationship which developed during the life of the Rural ES program can help us understand the impact of this growing trend on local programmatic efforts.
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Notes
For the ES program the main basis by which we identified explicit assumptions consisted of the Announcement, Congressional hearings for budget justification, and a memorandum written by one of the designers of the program (Budding, 1972). We have also drawn from the findings reported by Doyle, Crist-Whitzel, Donicht, Eixenberger, Everhart, McGeever, Pierce, and Toepper (1976), which included an extensive investigation of the early documents in the ES/Washington files.
Much of this discussion is derived from Herriott and Gross (1979), particularly chapters authored by Gideonse, Kirst, Lippitt, and Herriott. We particularly acknowledge the contribution of Gideonse, who first articulated the notion of explicit and tacit program assumptions and of several of the assumptions discussed in this chapter.
Throughout this and subsequent chapters, this important document will be referred to as “The Announcement.” It is reproduced in its entirety in Herriott and Gross (1979).
In the remainder of this volume we refer to the federal-level administration of the ES program as “ES/Washington.”
The original Request for Proposal and the contract between ES/Washington and Abt Associates for the external evaluation did include the specification of evaluative technical assistance to the sites. However, a contract modification during the first year of the research eliminated this provision because of its inherent conflict with the broader research objectives of the study.
Population figures are for 1970, and number of students for the 1972–1973 school year. The main sources of information for these descriptions are the social and educational histories of each community (Fitzsimmons et al., 1975) and our Professional Surveys of 1973 and 1974. In order to standardize cross-site comparisons of per-pupil expenditure for regional cost-of-living differences, the per-pupil-expenditure data reported by each district were adjusted using consumer-price-index (CPI) data for nonmetropolitan areas in the fall of 1973. See U.S. Department of Labor (1974), p. 59.
The data sources of this assessment include the letters of interest, historical accounts of each district written by trained social scientists who were assigned by Abt Associates to live full-time in each school district for at least three years (Fitzsimmons et al., 1975), periodic interviews with each of these “on-site researchers,” and questionnaires completed periodically by professional personnel in each district.
It must be noted that commitment to the innovate endeavor may be based primarily on “opportunistic” motives or “problem-solving” motives (Greenwood et al., 1975). However, it is beyond contention that in chronically underfunded rural school districts the two motives interact, and that the notion of administrative commitment is more important than the motive for that commitment.
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© 1981 Plenum Press, New York
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Rosenblum, S., Louis, K.S. (1981). On the Brink of Change. In: Stability and Change. Environment, Development, and Public Policy. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3234-3_4
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