Instructional Outcomes of School-Based Participative Decision Making

schools. While teacher participation has existed in some school districts for decades (Clune & White, 1988), its practice has accelerated rapidly over the past 10 years. Murphy and Beck (1995) estimated that by 1989 at least 14 states had developed school-based participative projects. By the early 1990s, thousands of districts across the country were experimenting with some form of participative decision making (Hill & Bonan, 1991). These forms range from school-based and district-level decision making bodies to teacher advisory groups to new decision making roles for individual teachers associated with career-ladder, lead-teacher, and master-teacher