Abstract
Recently in U. S. A., decentralization of educational governance has been in progress. Lots of school districts adopt School-Based Management (SBM), and leave the powers of personnel, budgeting, and curriculum to individual schools. School has more expanded discretion over them, therefore each school must become more accountable for their own educational outcome. Every power to manage school is almost in principals' hands today. They have to be responsible for diagnosis, evaluation, and improvement of every teacher's instructional activity. But the duty of teacher evaluation is often contradictory to the activities for instructional improvement. The former has "administrative" function, but the latter should be "advisory". Many principals are trying to arrange both of these different functions by making the new position of "Teacher Leader". It is sometimes called "quasi-administrative", which is playing some important roles in managing school. This paper clarifies the tendency towards organizational reform within a school with the progress of expanded discretion of individual schools. Especially the author analyses the position and roles of "Teacher Leaders" in three school cases of Broward County Public Schools, Florida. We can find at least two main roles of "Teacher Leader" from these cases. The first is supporting improvement of instruction : advising each teacher who needs assistance, and planning and implementing collaborative training activities. The second is facilitating building "school community" as a core of their colleagues. The principals intends to leave the duty of improvement of instruction to them who is not "Administrators." In these cases, the "Teacher Leaders" are really working very well. SMB has made school system controlled by educators professionally and not bureaucratically. And then, in school level, it means democratization of school management to place "Teacher Leader." There, however, might be some conflicts among teachers in fear of bureaucratization of inner school organization.
