"This thesis was written for the purpose of presenting a brief, though fairly detailed, history of the North Texas State Teachers College."--1.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the inhibitors affecting classroom teaching by surveying the perceptions of secondary teachers. This purpose was based on the growing crisis of "teacher burnout" which was thoroughly documented. Since it appears that burnout most often affects those teachers who work in conventional classrooms, characteristics of teaching effectiveness within these classrooms were the basis for inhibitor comparison. Seven characteristics were produced by a crosstabulation of studies on effective teaching spanning the last fifty years. The inhibitor choices presented with these seven characteristics were extracted from an extensive list produced by the literature and classified under six areas of origin. The characteristics and inhibitors ultimately selected were surveyed among teachers in a large Southwest metropolitan area.

The problem of this study was to compare the perceptions o£ Kansas state legislators, superintendents, and teachers toward the Arkansas Student Assessment Program. The purpose was to generate data which would benefit educational planners in Arkansas. Hypotheses which focused on current national issues in the statewide testing movement and on issues pertinent to the Arkansas program were constructed, and a questionnaire was developed to test the hypotheses. The questionnaire was mailed to all Arkansas state legislators and to the superintendent and a fourth-grade teacher in 100 randomly selected Arkansas school districts. Responses were received selected Arkansas school districts. 70 percent of superintendent from 50 percent of legislators, 70 per dents, and 74 per cent of teachers. The chi-square statistic was applied to individual questions in test for significance of difference between the groups, the Kruskal-Wallace one-way analysis of variance by ranks was applied to the hypotheses to test for significant differences between groups. In examining individual questions relating to legislators, superintendents, and teachers, significant differences were found on twenty three of the forty items on the questionnaire. A significant difference was found on each of the seven hypotheses, as follows: (1) superintendents and teachers understand the program better than legislators, …

Before the 1981 enactment of the Term Contract Nonrenewal Act in Texas, term contract teachers were entitled to a hearing only when the employment contract was terminated during the contract period or when the cause for nonrenewal was made public and had a stigmatizing effect on the reputational rights of the teacher. This new act has the effect of bridging the gap between what has been legal and what many would consider to be fundamentally fair in employment practices. The immediate impact of this law has left educators with the need to investigate the adequacy of the procedure used by the Texas Education Agency in implementing the hearings and appeals process regarding nonrenewal of term contracts. This, then, is the problem of this study.