MIDDLE SCHOOLS’ RESPONSES TO OUTSIDE PROJECT IN TAIWAN: TWO CASES STUDIES

Two middle schools from Kaohsiung, a city in the southern part of Taiwan, were selected for this research. One is located in the rim of the municipality and the other located in the downtown area. These schools both have applied to be part of the “Evaluation for Systemic School Development (ESSD)” which was initiated by National Taiwan Normal University with the aim of improving students’ achievement through their Diagnosing, Planning, Improving and Evaluating (DPIE) Model.
The purpose of this research is to compare how faculty members of these two schools react to the projects from outside and how the leaders interact with the faculty members during the process of the project. We thought there are two factors to influence the project. They are culture and power. The power is both the cause and the effect of interaction among school enviroment. The data include documents, meeting records and interviews. The results of in-depth interviews will be presented in a comparative way to illustrate the similarities and differences of the two schools’ responses while facing the challenges. From this study, we found there is short of communication between the university and the middle schools. The second, it seldom emerges the power of knowledge and the power of normative which are more important in the carring out process. The third, the staffs in the two middle schools have wrong opinions on the ouside project. Though the head teacher in one school has excellent opinions on education, it is not to help matters. Finally, theachers in the two schools anticipated their students to have a failure on the Basic Competence Test (the ninth grade students have to take the entrance examination to enter high schools in Taiwan). They think the school neighborhood is poor and the parents have no time and money to focus on students’ performance. We give some suggestions in the end.