Critical Issue:
Transferring Decisionmaking to Local Schools: Site-Based Management

ISSUE: Site-based management is a way to structure school site/district relationships in a manner that places much more power, authority, and accountability in the school. It has been proposed as a way to help schools produce higher student achievement.

OVERVIEW: Decentralized, high-involvement management means that teams of individuals who actually provide services or make products are given decision-making authority and are held accountable for the results. It is now the emerging management and organization model in both the public and private sectors of the economy (Barzelay, 1992; Katzenbach & Smith, 1993; Lawler, 1986, 1992; Wohlstetter, Smyer & Mohrman, 1994).

A management and organization strategy should be designed around the nature of the work, which has three key dimensions: complexity, collegiality, and certainty. Simple, individual, and highly certain work lends itself to hierarchical structures.

Complex, collegial, and uncertain work, however, lends itself to decentralization and employee involvement, common in new high-technology organizations like Apple Computer. An increasing amount of work is complex, requires teamwork, and exists in a rapidly changing environment. Mohrman, Lawler, and Mohrman (1992) argue that teachers perform intellectually complex tasks, are most effective when working collegially or in teams, and face uncertainty in their day-to-day work. Therefore, a high-involvement and decentralized management strategy is appropriate for schools.

GOALS: Site-based management should result in the following:

• Higher student performance
• More efficient use of resources
• Increased skills and satisfaction in school administrators and teachers
• Greater community and business involvement in and support for schools

ACTION OPTIONS:

• Decentralize four key resources:
1. Power
2. Knowledge and skills
3. Information
4. Rewards
• Create an instructional guidance system.
• Develop new roles for teachers, principals, and community members.

These action options also are strongly associated with positive changes in curriculum and instruction, including teaching for understanding, teaching problem solving to diverse students, and teaching an integrated and cross-disciplinary curriculum (Robertson, Wohlstetter, & Mohrman, 1995, forthcoming). A comprehensive decision-making process promotes ambitious school improvement initiatives.

IMPLEMENTATION PITFALLS: Designing and implementing effective site-based management programs in education present many challenges, which include at least the following:

• Decentralizing power only and placing that power solely in a school site council. Power, knowledge, information, and rewards all need to be decentralized, and vertical and horizontal decision-making teams must be created in addition to a school site council.
• Directing the efforts of an effective shared decision-making process toward curriculum, instruction, and student achievement. Too often, site-based management efforts create "Christmas Tree" programs with no coherent focus or direction.
• Getting teachers out of their classrooms and into a variety of schoolwide efforts that over time make the school a high performance educational organization.
• Finding time for teachers to engage in the added responsibilities of effective school-based decisionmaking. Meeting this challenge usually means restructuring both the school organization and the teacher's job, including how the teacher spends his or her time.
• Using a real accountability system, with real consequences, sanctions, and rewards. Such a system requires accurate measurements of system performance - the primary indicator being student achievement.
• Sticking with a decentralized decision-making plan, rather than adding a new layer of regulations about how decisions should be made, overruling decisions made at the site, or quickly moving back to a centralized decision-making system.

DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW: Not everyone agrees that site-based management will improve school performance. Malen, Ogawa, and Kranz (1990) and Wohlstetter and Odden (1992) have shown that such programs applied to schools prior to 1990 rarely decentralized significant portions of the budget, provided substantive personnel authority, were comprehensive, or improved student achievement. Smylie (1994) shows that few programs engaged teachers in curriculum and instruction change, further limiting their effectiveness.

Site-based management should entail more than just creating school site councils and giving them the power to make some decisions. It must be designed comprehensively and used to educate all students in high standards of thinking and problem solving.

ILLUSTRATIVE CASES: Several places in the United States and around the world have developed sophisticated and comprehensive site-based management programs, including the following:

Chicago, Illinois

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Minneapolis, Minnesota

St. Paul, Minnesota

CONTACTS:

Education Commission of the States
707 17th Street, Suite 2700
Denver, CO 80202-3427
(303) 299-3600, fax (303) 296-8332
E-mail: ecs@ecs.org
WWW: http://www.ecs.org

Finance Center
Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706-1796
Allan Odden, co-director
E-mail: odden@macc.wisc.edu

References

This Critical Issue summary was researched and written by Allan R. Odden, codirector of the Finance Center, Consortium for Policy Research in Education, and professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Date posted: 1995