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School finance reform is contentious. Critics charge that funds states provide to poor districts are wasted on salary increases, administrative featherbedding, and reduction of local property taxes. This paper analyzes the results of New Jersey's most recent school finance reform. The findings show that (a) little money was spent on property tax relief, (b) the salary gap between rich and poor districts remained, and (c) the proportion of staff that were administrators was comparable in both rich and poor districts. Thus, funds were not wasted, and a number of useful expenditures were made. However, after three years of reform, rich districts still spent more and had more staff.

This study aims to present a thematic analysis on cohort-based teaching and learning from four education doctorate degree programs. Recommendations are then presented to other scholars engaging in research on cohort-based, graduate degree programs.

Yin’s (2018) embedded, multiple case study approach guided the design of this study. Data collection consisted of three- to four-day site visits to each program and included the following data sources: program documents (e.g. handbooks, syllabi and third-party evaluations), class observations and semi-structured interviews with students, faculty and program directors.

This study describes how collaboration and collective learning were key components in each program’s coursework and milestone expectations, arguing that such an emphasis contributed to opportunities for collaboration and collective learning experiences.

Research has documented a number of outcomes associated with cohort-based programs in terms of group dynamics. The authors examine this quality further by showing how specific structures and practices within each program’s cohort model supported not only peer collaboration but also overall student learning.

Principals face shifting accountability pressures from many sources. The most notable recent change in the USA has been the growing pressure from state and federal government. The purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which the accountability pressures experienced by principals in one American state were the same as those reported in research documenting “objective” changes in those pressures.

This qualitative study uses interviews with New Jersey middle school principals. The purposeful sample includes principals who had been in their buildings at least three years and enhances variation on socioeconomic status (as measured by New Jersey's rating of “district factor groups”) and school achievement. The authors averaged three years of achievement data and controlled for variation in poverty, ethnicity, language proficiency, and enrollment. A total of 37 principals were contacted; 25 were interviewed. Principals first rank ordered seven sources of accountability. They were then interviewed to learn why the one they ranked highest was most important.

The most frequent top source of accountability was “your own conscience.” Principals who selected this option highlighted a sense of personal responsibility, responsibility to the children in their charge, and how conscience mediates among competing accountabilities. Accountability to one's conscience was most prevalent in high achieving schools.

Frequent reference to internal responsibility among leaders suggests that they continue to feel a strong sense of internal accountability in spite of increasing external pressures. It also illustrates the range of external, often conflicting pressures that principals face which include pressures from the public and the district office as well as state and federal government. In this increasingly prescriptive and contradictory environment the principal's moral code is important to her or his school.

This paper aims to explore how teacher leaders help teachers improve mathematics and science teaching.

Research focused on a purposive sample of seven teacher leaders selected to vary in their time allocated to teacher leader work and their content knowledge. Each teacher leader was interviewed, as were two teachers and at least one administrator working with that teacher leader. Each interview was first subjected to a mix of deductive and inductive coding before a case study was written for each teacher leader. Ultimately, a cross‐case analysis was written.

Teacher leaders conducted two sets of leadership tasks. The paper finds that support tasks helped teachers do their work but did not contribute to teacher learning. Developmental tasks did facilitate learning. All teacher leaders engaged in support tasks, but only four did developmental tasks as well. Teacher leaders who engaged in developmental tasks had access to one material resource and three social resources not available to other teacher leaders: time to work with teachers, administrative support, more positive relations with teachers, and opportunities to work with teachers on professional development

When teacher leadership is intended to facilitate teacher learning, the payoff comes from engaging in developmental tasks. A key to teacher leader success is administrative support. Schools and districts should not invest in teacher leaders unless they intend to support teacher leaders adequately through time, administrative follow through, and training to help teachers develop the positive social relations on which their work depends.

These findings have implications for how to integrate teacher leaders into larger school improvement efforts.

This case puts students in the shoes of the Ebola response leadership teams of Firestone Liberia and its parent company, Bridgestone Americas, as they worked together to respond to the deadly 2014 Ebola epidemic. While the companies had received positive press for their containment of the virus on their rubber farm in Liberia, which was home to 8,000 employees and 80,000 Liberian citizens, the situation off the property was worsening. With death counts rising and hospitals across the nation closing as staff caught the virus, the Liberian government declared a national state of emergency. The teams now faced the possibility that the government might attempt to take control of the farm's medical center. How could they balance their duty to care effectively for employees against the demands of the Liberian government? Should they try to fend off the government or cooperate to meet the government's demands? Students will learn how to do a methodical situation analysis that considers ethical obligations and strategic implications, and to distill their recommendation into a briefing for senior leadership.

Wherever television is a commercial venture which earns a significant percentage of revenues from advertising, it tends to be transformed to better serve the needs of ad agencies and their clients. One oft raised complaint is that in an attempt to raise ratings and viewership, advertisers insist that shows cater to the “lowest common denominator” of society; as a result, quality programming is often compromised, eliminated, or banished to time periods when viewing is inconvenient. Programme diversity is also undermined. This paper suggests that the strategies of commercial television often restrict high quality programming even if the actual sponsors are committed to quality and diversity. This is done to create an environment which will best serve the majority of sponsors, and thus attract maximum advertising revenues. A history of Voice of Firestone (a long‐lived programme on U.S. Radio and TV) will be used as an example of this tendency. In an era when Europe is becoming more involved with commercial television, the lesson of such examples is especially significant.

The tendency for communication researchers in the area of crisis management to limit data collection and analysis by national borders consequently limits practitioner understanding of the dynamics of crisis planning and response. The Firestone/Ford tyre recall crisis of 2000‐2001 presents an opportunity to mine data on a massive, global scale in an effort to better understand and explain media and public response at that level. The author analyses media reports gleaned from around the world to suggest ways to incorporate potentially determining factors into crisis planning and response matrices. Those factors include media structure and function, as well as cultural syndromes.

European television is on the brink of being transformed by a new breed of commercial stations which garner revenues from advertisements — not merely taxes, governmental subsidies, and/or legislation which requires viewers to underwrite the programmes they watch. European commercial television, now in its infancy and usually only available to those with cable TV, exhibits all the signs of being an emerging “enfant terrible”. “Annual double‐digit gains in … (TV) advertising in Europe” will continue for the next 20 years, predicts John Eger, a major international media consultant and former senior Vice President of CBS Worldwide Enterprises.