You can enhance the following activities from the Instructor's Resource Manual by incorporating the resources available on the World Wide Web.

School Administrators

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests:
Invite one or more administrator (principals, superintendents, central office staff) to class to discuss their responsibilities. Have them focus on procedures for establishing school or district policies, for working with school-based management teams, for changing the curriculum, and for hiring new personnel. Before the discussion with school administrators, have students develop a list of questions and prepare the room for an Oprah-type discussion format. After the discussion, students should write a brief reflective paper.

To help students prepare for a guest speaker, or for more research on school administration, you might direct students to the following web sites:

Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
This professional organization welcomes teachers, administrators, and elected officials as members.

American Association of School Administrators
This professional organization for principals and other school administrators has 14,000 members from all over the country.

National Association of Elementary School Principals
This organization for elementary and middle-school principals offers publications, news highlights, and more.

National Association of Secondary School Principals
This is "the organization for principals, assistant principals and aspiring principals" of middle and high schools.

Intermediate School Districts

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests:
Identify the typical services provided by intermediate school districts. Then ask students to analyze the relative value of those services as compared with the services of either the local district or the state department of education.

To help them with this project, you may wish to have students visit the web sites of some intermediate school districts. A search for "intermediate school district" will yield many results from most popular Internet search engines. Popular search engines include:

Yahoo

Google

Look Smart

Lycos

Ask Jeeves

One state that seems to have a lot of intermediate school districts is Michigan. That state's department of education has posted a handy set of links to them:
Michigan Intermediate School Districts

Local and State Control

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests these two assignments for students:

• For two weeks, clip articles on educational issues from a local newspaper. For each article, indicate whether control for the issues comes from the local, state, or federal level. Evaluate whether control for each issue should reside at a different level from what is specified in the article.
• Access your state department of education web site and examine current information (press releases or bulletins) released by the department. Develop a list of ways the state proclamations will affect local districts in the state.

The Newslink site may help students with the first assignment, collecting articles from local media, by connecting them to the online archives of several newspapers, magazines, and television stations:
Newslink
This site, associated with the American Journalism Review, provides links to newspapers, magazines, and television stations all over the world.

For help with the second assignment, you might suggest that students visit:
National Association of State Boards of Education
The web site for this organization offers research and news on educational issues, as well as links to all the state departments of education.

State Departments of Education
ERIC provides a handy map-based way to link to all of the state departments of education.

The Federal Role in Education

The Instructor's Resource Manual suggests two activities:

• Describe the responsibilities and activities of the U.S. Department of Education. If possible, obtain a summary of the budget to indicate the types of programs supported (the Department of Education or Education Week generally has this information). Have the students evaluate the value of federal government support for educational programs relative to local and state support.
• Have students monitor education periodicals (Education Week, The Kappan, etc.) for articles on federal education policy. Once relevant topics have been identified, students should create posters for or against the policy under consideration.

U.S. Department of Education

Education Week

Phi Delta Kappan

Journals and Periodicals
This is a linked list of education-related publications, created at the University of Missouri.