ABSTRACT
The ‘excellence movement’ resulted in policies that prescribed educational reform from the top down. These state legislative mandates, considered ‘safe’ in their approach, aimed to improve educational outcomes by improving the teaching act. This ‘excellence movement’ focused quite specifically on fixing the people and not the organizational structure of schools. The ‘excellence movement’ was seen as the standards-raising for school improvement (Murphy and Hallinger, 1993). Analysis of the ‘excellence movement’ revealed that the conventional public schools of the mid-1980s with their standardized, highly regulated environments were ill-suited for school reform. The restructuring movement in the 1990s took a bottom-up approach for school improvement that called for districts to modify the structure of educational decision-making and realign the balance of authority among teachers, administrators, and parents. This early movement, known as site-based management (SBM), meant more than just delegating authority to lower levels of the system. Within the SBM movement came the call for greater accountability in conjunction with the return of more authority to the schools.
