Search results

The purposes of this study were (1) to examine the characteristics of teacher involvement in the decision making process in schools; (2) to examine the degree of loyalty to principals in schools; (3) to test the relationship between teacher decisional status and loyalty to the principal; and (4) to explore the dynamics of teacher decision‐making so that a better understanding of the underlying structure of decision‐making in schools can be developed. Data were collected at regularly scheduled faculty meetings in ten elementary and five secondary schools in New Jersey. In general, analysis of variance was utilized as the basis of statistical analysis. Further, a factor analysis was performed in an attempt to understand the underlying structure of the data. Four major conclusions were drawn from the study: (1) Teacher satisfaction with their decisional status was related to loyalty to the principal; (2) no significant differences were found between elementary and secondary schools with regard to satisfaction with their decisional status; (3) elementary school teachers exhibited a greater degree of loyalty to their principals than did teachers in secondary schools; and (4) teachers' desires to participate in decision‐making are strongest in those areas that are closely related to the teaching‐learning process.

This essay aims at retracing the intellectual and biographical events of the economist Gino Arias (1879–1940), examining more in detail the two seasons at the opposite ends of his life: the early one that saw him considerably committed to the Zionist cause and the one that, thirty years later, would force him to confront the racial laws of the Fascist regime.

Despite the seeming tragic continuity of these two phases, Arias’s case is a real historiographical paradox since, over the long span between the opposite ends of his biography, not only did he distance himself from the Zionist movement, but he also gradually laid the foundations for his upcoming and immediate dedication to Fascism; indeed, within the Fascist regime he would stand out as an authoritative and influential theorist of corporatism, the institutional solution Mussolini tried to exploit to organize the national economic life.

After carefully examining Arias’s early contributions to the Zionist cause (that include the establishment of the Florentine Zionist Group and that led him toward strongly nationalistic stances), this essay sums up Arias’s intellectual biography during the next years and then, thanks to unprecedented documents from the Italian Ministry of Interior, closely looks into his fate after his conversion to Catholicism in 1932 and up against the racial laws of 1938, as well as into his attempts to escape persecution. A few final observations will then try to highlight the dramatic exemplarity of his case.