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The purpose of this paper is to share a model of a principal preparation program that is socially responsible. The program is collaborative with two departments at the Texas A&M University College of Education and Human Development: Educational Administration and Human Resource Development and Educational Psychology (Bilingual Education). The program is being tested as (a) a four-semester program for 36 credit hours, (b) a year-long residency with an intensive summer residency, (c) a randomized control trial study with the treatment students receiving virtual mentoring and coaching, and (d) an analysis of family-community involvement program and dual language program development by the candidates. How we are evaluating the project is also shared.

The increased demand for online courses correlates to increased workloads for faculty, staff, and leadership. Hiring, staffing, and other logistical matters often trump the emphasis on course quality. This paper introduces a strategic framework for creating and sustaining a successful distance education model. Tarrant County College Connect Campus is the provider of online courses and programs within a larger, urban, two-year public institution. Established as a campus in 2014, TCC Connect Campus reflects an intentional framework to ensure quality. Ten specific strategies for quality assurance in online delivery include: Online Instructor Certification, Peer Developed Courses, E-Faculty Coaching, Faculty Performance Indicators, Supplemental Evaluation Feedback Form, adoption of external standards, data dashboards, campus data team, faculty and leadership repositories, and course readiness checklist. These research-based tenets may be adapted and modified to address the needs of other distance education providers.

This paper interrogates the case for improved and broadened public sustainability reporting by universities, and explores whether and how global performance measures capture the institutional attitudes and activities pertinent to universities' contributions to sustainability. The analysis explores all stand-alone, English language reports produced by universities world-wide since 2007. The analysis focuses primarily on the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) index. The paper finds that those universities which have adopted the GRI share a distinct conceptualisation of their role in society. The GRI framework is helpful in capturing universities' environmental impacts and benefits, but is lacking in relation to universities' human rights and social concerns. The paper identifies value in universities adopting a globally accepted sustainability reporting framework and makes specific suggestions as to how the framework might be better adapted for universities.

This article will seek to utilize Dr. William Allan Kritsonis' book "Ways of Knowing Through the Realms of Meaning" (2007) as a framework to improve a campus's standardized test scores, more specifically, their TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills) scores. Many campuses have an improvement plan, also known as a Campus Improvement Plan, which strives to improve many aspects on their campus, but mostly their standardized test scores. Utilizing the six realms of meaning, symbolics, empirics, esthetics, synnoetics, ethics, and synoptics, schools can better prepare their students on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

This paper proposes an extended-time, three-course technology integration model that allows preservice teachers adequate time to absorb, reflect about, connect with, and be supported by technology. This course sequence facilitates development of the ability to use technology simultaneously with the development of the skills and knowledge necessary to become an effective teacher. In addition to the cognitive and curricular benefits for extending the amount of time our teacher candidates are exposed to technology for teaching, this paper describes an unexpected advantage in that this course sequence allows us to present educational technology to students through three progressive perspectives, including establishing an initial vision, negotiating a developing vision, and seeking a realistic vision.

To explore current and future implications of the economic downturn, "EDUCAUSE Review" assembled a panel of senior IT leaders: (1) Bruce Maas, CIO, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; (2) Fredrick Miller, CIO, Furman University; (3) Pattie Orr, Vice President for IT and Dean of University Libraries, Baylor University; (4) Julie Ouska, CIO and Vice President of Information Technologies, Colorado Community College System; and (5) Shelton M. Waggener, Associate Vice Chancellor and CIO, University of California, Berkeley. These leaders answer questions regarding their IT budgets, possible structural changes and cost models, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

In the fall of 2015, Jonathan Howland interviewed about a dozen independent school heads to inquire about novel programs and developments in their schools that, if they take root and flourish, could be "game changing"; about their vision of independent schools 40 years hence, in mid-21st-century America; and about impediments to reaching this vision. Among those interviewed were Emily Jones of The Putney School (Vermont), Andrew Vadnais of South Kent School (Connecticut), Kate Windsor of Miss Porter's School (Connecticut), Jim Scott of Punahou School (Hawai'i), Eric Temple of Lick-Wilmerding High School (California), Mo Copeland of Oregon Episcopal School (Oregon), Peter Hutton of Beaver Country Day (Massachusetts), Mark Salkind of The Urban School of San Francisco (California), Matt Glendinning of Moses Brown School (Rhode Island), Russell Shaw of Georgetown Day School (Washington, DC), and Kim Wargo formerly of The Hockaday School (Texas). In this article, Howland cites responses from these current or recent heads of schools and based on their responses, he concludes that independent schools that thrived in the last century embodied the virtues of self-examination, ambition, and judicious planning. These may no longer be sufficient. New cultural markers will include the capacity to be nimble and adaptable, and to experience innovation and change not as "countercultural" measures or "disruptive" threats but rather as endemic practices in every corner of the campus.

States have adopted a variety of policies to encourage universities to expand research production, with the hope of supporting economic growth and competitiveness. This paper considers whether a state-level initiative succeeded in influencing university-based research outputs among regional public universities. We test whether the Texas Research Incentive Program increased research production at a set of state universities as measured by total research spending, federally-funded research spending, the number of scholarly publications, and the share of publications published in high impact factor journals. Using a novel dataset and difference-in-differences analytic strategy, we found that TRIP adoption was associated with a 19%-25% increase in research expenditures at emerging research universities in Texas relative to a matched set of comparable universities. However, TRIP did not influence federally-funded research expenditures or journal publication outputs. We also show that federally-funded research expenditures influence publication outputs — both in amount and quality — and that number of full-time faculty influences both federal research expenditures and publication outputs. We discuss contributions to the literature on regional public universities, loose coupling, and research production, as well as implications for policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As our environment becomes increasingly urban, the governance of urban regions faces multifaceted challenges. There is growing recognition that studying the governance of urban regions requires looking beyond individual plans and examining networks of plans. Existing work on plan networks focuses on documents, neglecting the agency of the people and governments who create and implement the plans. To help fill this gap, we develop and test an analytical framework for assessing urban governance within a network of plans, focusing on the alignment of plan content, interactions, and the relative efficacy of the plans. We apply this framework in metropolitan Austin, Texas (USA), studying five strategic plans that address the region's built environments, transportation systems, and natural areas over a 20 year-period. The analysis reveals how voluntary regional scenario-planning conducted decades earlier continues to shape city and regional development goals; how alignment between plans on paper can belie poor cross-jurisdictional coordination in practice; and how plans addressing transportation and natural areas are more efficacious for implementation than plans for the built environment. In addition to making plan dynamics visible, the framework thus allows for rigorous, empirical assessment of regional governance through a network of plans. • A framework is proposed to analyze urban-region governance with a network of plans. • The framework is tested with five strategic plans in Austin, Texas (USA). • Evidence is found of a network consisting of documents and agency. • Network-of-plan research benefits from the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has implemented a leadership system that promotes employee alignment and engagement with the airport's strategic plan and has generated superior business results. Each phase and element of this system is integrated to help management and employees understand how they affect DFW's most important goals and initiatives that drive performance. Although DFW has been implementing its current leadership system for the past six years, it has still not integrated all concepts throughout all levels of the organisation. This paper provides an overview of DFW's leadership system, describes how DFW implemented the system, and indicates lessons learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The partners of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), a post-Second World War architecture firm in Texas, USA, were especially innovative in their professional and business practices. One of their original contributions was the firm's marketing strategy, which was based on promoting not only design achievements but also the CRS 'research attitude' by publishing and distributing studies produced by members of the firm. This strategy, which built on a wide-spread American belief in the fundamental role of science and research in the nation's progress and development, was successful in the first two decades of the firm, but was dissolved in the 1970s with the firm's expansion and transformation into a profit-oriented enterprise. This paper describes the firm's research-based marketing strategy and argues that the success of the marketing strategy relied on the CRS partners' ability first, to integrate marketing into the firm's approach to architecture and design and into cultural norms of the time and secondly, to balance the expectations of both their potential clients and their professional peers. The CRS marketing strategy is an important case study for architects today as they respond creatively to similarly competing demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Case studies help airport professionals prepare for real-world problems, situations and crises by providing an approximation of various professional environments. One way to study airport issues is through the use of strategic planning case studies. Strategic planning is the process of developing a method to identify what products are to be provided to which customers, where they will be provided, and at what price. Strategic planning in the airport environment summarises the basic operational tasks, goals, objectives, strategies and tactics based on the vision and mission statements previously developed by the airport organisation. This paper studies strategic planning at Waco Regional Airport and provides a suggested model for the development of future airport case studies to be used in the airport management training environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As more Latinx students enroll at Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), it is important for institutions of higher education to intentionally engage in strategic planning that aligns their mission, values, and goals with their changing environments. In this content analysis, we examined how the strategic plans of 19 public 2-year and 4-year HSIs in Texas described the ways in which they served Latinx students beyond enrollment and graduation rates. We propose three HSI orientations – Latinx-ghosting, Latinx-leaning, and Latinx-serving – to demonstrate how HSIs target efforts and resources to serve Latinx students. Our findings suggest there are misalignments between the goals outlined in some strategic plans and the actual measures and practices provided to achieve these goals. Ultimately, we argue that strategic plans from institutions codified as Latinx-serving have the potential to serve as peer examples and roadmaps for current HSIs and emerging-HSIs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public management scholars have made impressive strides in explaining managerial usage of performance information (PI). Does such PI use matter to performance? If so, what types of use make a difference? To answer these questions, we connect managerial self-reported behavior with objective organizational outcomes in Texas schools. We control for lagged comparative school performance and employ inverse probability weighting to mitigate endogeneity concerns. The results show that managerial use of PI is associated with objective indicators of performance, and that the type of use matters. In particular, school principals' use of PI for strategic planning is positively associated with better high-stakes test scores. The findings suggest that maturity of performance management system can shape the relationship between managerial PI use and organizational performance, thereby contributing to a contingency-based understanding of the relationship between performance management and organizational performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a 5-year planning process that addressed the decline of hunting participation in Texas. We began the planning process by examining 20 years of research that revealed a decline in hunting participation and factors contributing to the decline. We convened a Hunting Think Tank meeting where we presented the 20-year trend data to 30 individuals with vested interests in the future of hunting in Texas. One outcome of the first meeting was the development of a synthesis brochure, "The Future of Hunting in Texas," to educate the hunting public and stakeholders about current trends and future implications and build support for the need to develop a strategic plan. The Future of Hunting information and brochure were presented to the Hunting Advisory Board of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, after which the Board added development of a strategic plan to its agenda. In fact, the 2002 Governor's Hunting Heritage Symposium was delayed one year until a strategic plan was developed. Group Solutions was hired to survey the hunting and nonhunting public about the future of hunting in Texas. Its survey data were used to define content of the strategic plan during a 2-day meeting of 60 invited stakeholders before the annual conference of the Texas Wildlife Association. The strategic plan included, among other things, all issues and problems associated with the decline in hunting participation in Texas, an action plan to address the decline, and the requirements needed to activate the plan. Several other valuable outcomes derived from the planning process, beyond development of the Strategic Plan, were included in this report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic libraries are under continued pressure to provide quality services and resources in support of the educational needs of their institutions while experiencing shrinking budgets and calls for greater accountability. Since 2010, the University of Texas at Austin Libraries (“UT Libraries”) has been embedding in its organization a data-driven and data-supported continuous planning process that utilizes the Balanced Scorecard. The collection and analysis of assessment and performance data have been integrated into both the planning and evaluation phases of its strategy development. This article will provide a case study of how UT Libraries is employing assessment activities and continuous planning to transform itself through increased accountability and transparency, while empowering all staff to participate in charting the future of the organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this study was to develop a marketing plan for the Physical and Occupational Therapy (PT/OT) department at a Critical Access Hospital (CAH). We took the approach of understanding and analyzing the rural community and health care environment, problems faced by the PT/OT department, and developing a strategic marketing plan to resolve those problems. We used hospital admissions data, public and physician surveys, a SWOT analysis, and tools to evaluate alternative strategies. Lack of awareness and negative perception were key issues. Recommended strategies included building relationships with physicians, partnering with the school district, and enhancing the wellness program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A special challenge for the transition of Menninger/Kansas to Menninger/Texas was the preparation of suitable facilities for the relocated operations in Houston. The vice president of Facilities & Property Management recounts the tasks that were his responsibility and the process he went through to assure a successful move not only to Houston, but also within Houston planning for two major moves in less than a decade, an unprecedented challenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cette étude examine empiriquement dans quelle mesure 357 p.m.e. du Texas font usage de la planification stratégique. Ces entreprises ont été classifiées selon le niveau de planification au- quel elles appartiennent. Or, nous distinguons cinq niveaux, qui s'étendent de l'absence totale de planification jusqu'à l'usage de stratégies trés précises. En géneral, l'étude de cet échantillonne fait voir fort peu de planification stratégique; en effet. Ton remarque que moins d'un quart des entreprises en question semble faire usage de la planification stratégique proprement dite. Toute- fois un autre quart de notre échantillon nous semble assez voisin de cette planification. Cette étude, enfin, a fourni des donne"es qui permettent de supposer que parmi les p.m.e. celles de plus grande taille sont porte"es davantage a faire usage de la planification stratégique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]