School Quality, School Program, and Teacher Self-Evaluation

Abstract

For about ten years now, there has been an increasingly intense discussion going on in the Federal Republic of Germany on the topic "More independence for the individual school." Terras such as "school autonomy" or "partial autonomy of the individual schools" or "broader freedom to structure the schools" and other similar slogans are frequent. Comparative efforts also exist—in some cases for quite a long time—in a number of other European countries—for example, Austria, some of the Swiss cantons, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, Sweden, and Denmark. It is good to know that this theme not only concerns an international pedagogical set of problems but that it is being discussed and pursued increasingly in direct research and contacts between colleagues in different countries. It seems we are on the way to a new phase of international reform pedagogy, comparable, with new accents, to the reform pedagogy of the first third of the twentieth century, now nearing its end, which was also in large measure an international pedagogical movement.