The Management of Decline in Education: The Case of Quebec

The research reported here was undertaken as an exploratory study in order to identify management strategies developed by school districts in Quebec to deal with what appears to be the most severely declining enrollments in Canada. It was also intended to identify the consequences of implementing these strategies. The researchers primary concerns were with (1) observing and describing the relationships between the social and the organizational environments of school systems and the process of selecting specific management strategies, (2) observing and describing the consequences of the management strategies implemented, and (3) attempting to evaluate their effectiveness in both the short and the long term.