From the author of the acclaimed and influential Making Schools Work comes Untitled on Education, a guide to the revolutionary reforms that are changing public education in some of the nation's biggest cities.

• Builds on the author's growing reputation. Making Schools Work influenced New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein's effort to radically decentralize the nation's largest school system. Seven of the ten largest school districts in the u.S. have now implemented the decentralization championed in that book.

• Based on a groundbreaking study by the author. Ouchi studied 442 schools in Boston, Chicago, Houston, New York City, Oakland, St. Paul, San Francisco, and Seattle that have embraced school decentralization. He shows how decentralization has improved school performance as measured by standardized tests.

• Explains the key to school success. Principals must be given control of their budgets and other authority. When they are empowered, they allocate funds to increase the number of teachers and lower the Total Student Load (TSL) per teacher. TSL is the key factor in school performance. Principals with autonomy invariably lower their school's TSL.

William G. Ouchi is the Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Professor in Corporate renewal at the Anderson Graduate School of management at UCLA. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Theory Z: How American Management Can Meet the Japanese Challenge. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

A REVOLUTIONARY ORGANIZATIONAL REFORM IS SWEEPING URBAN SCHOOL SYSTEMS ACROSS THE COUNTRY AND RAISING STUDENT PERFORMANCE DRAMATICALLY. HERE IS THE STORY BEHIND THIS REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION.

In his previous book, Making Schools Work, William G. Ouchi reported on school decentralization, aided by a grant from the National Science Foundation. He found that when principals were given autonomy over their schools, the performance of those schools improved measurably. Picking up where that book left off, The Secret of TSL explains what it is that autonomous principals do to improve their schools. Drawing on the author's study of 442 schools in eight urban school districts, The Secret of TSL demonstrates that there is a direct correlation between how much control a principal has over his or her budget and how much that school's student performance rises. School organization reform lone produces a more potent improvement in student performance than any other single factor.

When principals control their budgets, they tailor their expenses to fit their schools, and they invariably hire more teachers. With fewer students to teach, teachers are able to develop a stronger and more personal relationship with their students. TSL, or Total Student Load -- that is, the number of papers a teacher must grade and the number of students he or she must get to know each term -- declines, and student performance, as measured by federally mandated tests, improves, often substantially. TSL is the key to improved student performance.

The school districts that Ouchi studied for this book include Boston, New York, Chicago, St. Paul, Houston, San Francisco, Oakland, and Seattle. The Secret of TSL analyzes school performance in each of these cities and shows why the districts that wholeheartedly embraced organizational reform have outperformed those that took more tentative steps.

This is a book that every school board member, every principal, and every parent leader must read.