Critical Issue:
Supporting Reform: The Role of the School District Board

ISSUE: In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States changed from a nation of mostly private and independent schools to one of statewide public education systems. With this transformation, locally controlled school boards came to dominate curriculum and instruction policy and served to keep public education in line with the values and desires of the community. Today, however, schools are expected to meet national curriculum and student performance standards, many communities are implementing site-based management of education, and students and parents are able to choose between traditional public schools and charter schools. Given these dramatic changes, school boards must reconceive their role in education.

OVERVIEW: The Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) (1986) issued a major report on school boards in 1986. The report concluded that school boards lacked the capacity for meaningful goal setting and the ability to make plans to accomplish specific goals. School boards were not willing to take the political risks needed to provide leadership for education reform and to be key "players" in the reform movement. They were not spending enough time learning about education issues and policymaking, and they were not collaborating with other agencies to meet the evolving social needs of students. As part of the system charged with implementing state-defined education reforms, school boards were not exercising adequate policy oversight or maintaining accountability. The report also found that school boards were reluctant to decentralize decisionmaking power to school sites - despite public statements to the contrary - even when centralized authority was seen as an obstacle to school improvement.

IEL admitted that its criticisms might not apply to all school boards. The major problems were found in big-city, urban districts - not in all districts across the country. Moreover, the report found, state and federal requirements often left school boards bogged down in local micro- management.

IEL concluded that if school boards did not change, they risked becoming irrelevant to the major education issues facing the country. School boards needed to address not only their own internal problems, but also the long-term effects on education policy brought on by external forces. They would have to respond to the new goals of the education reform movement, such as increasing site-based management, maintaining the emerging professional standards for curriculum and instruction, integrating community services to meet the social needs of students and families, and educating all students to high standards.

GOALS:

• Share power with and delegate decisionmaking to the school sites.
• Maintain professional standards for curriculum and instruction.
• Increase services available to and through schools.
• Educate all students to high educational standards.

ACTION OPTIONS:

• Establish new roles for the school board.
• Establish new roles for the superintendent and central office.
• Develop and practice new forms of collective bargaining.
• Build consensus among diverse stakeholders.
• Work with businesses and social service agencies.


Charles Terrett, superintendent of Fulton County Schools in Hickman, Kentucky, discusses the benefits of collaboration to serve families by the school and social service agencies (QuickTime slide show, 493K). Excerpted from NCREL's videoseries, Schools That Work: The Research Advantage, videoconference 8, Integrating Community Services (NCREL, 1992). A text version is available.


Otis Johnson, executive director of the Chatham©Savannah Youth Futures Authority in Savannah, Georgia, talks about how developing a community vision helps collaboration (230K). Excerpted from NCREL's videoseries, Schools That Work: The Research Advantage videoconference 8, Integrating Community Services (NCREL, 1992). A text version is available.

• Create a clear and focused accountability system.

IMPLEMENTATION PITFALLS:

• Bringing the community along. The dramatic transformation suggested by the IEL report needs to take place in an atmosphere of openness and due process. The accountability system, which should indicate improving school performance over time, is an important element. Including key community leaders and the local media also is critical.
• Coordinating the entire range of services for children. Improving student performance requires more than just the school community it must involve the greater community as well.
• Involving teacher organizations as partners. Teachers must be active participants and collaborators in school reform - particularly reform designed to result in greater teacher decisionmaking and responsibility.

DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW:

1. These new roles for school districts will require new skills, relationships, and rules. Change will always be difficult, and people who are satisfied with the status quo will raise objections. Others will object that changing the skills, relationships, and rules is merely tinkering and that the solution for public education is to circumvent the existing system entirely.



Home schooling, public vouchers for private schools, charter schools, and private management of public systems are all strategies that would fundamentally change - rather than adjust - the current system.

2. For more than two decades, school accountability efforts have been modeled after a system known as "management by objectives" (MBO). Such programs typically include statements of measurable objectives, data collection systems to determine whether those objectives have been reached, and procedures for revising practices when objectives are not being met. Claims of success for such systems often come from the private sector - particularly from product-oriented organizations.

Recently, however, advocates for "total quality management" (TQM) have argued that stringent MBO systems, usually implemented in a top-down manner, fall short of their promise for school accountability. W. Edwards Deming often stated that national goals and standards were absolutely the wrong way to generate school improvement. Hammer and Champy (1993) write that "none of the management fads of the last twenty years . . . has reversed the deterioration of America's corporate competitive performance. They have only distracted managers from the real task at hand." The focus on product or outcome that is embedded in most MBO accountability models virtually precludes close attention to organizational processes. This argument suggests that efforts to improve schools through assessment- driven systems will not result in higher levels of student learning. Such efforts will merely assure high levels of frustration among educators who want nothing more than to help students learn.

3. The IEL report suggested that emphasizing site-based decisionmaking might be more appropriate for large school districts - the bulk of which are in urban areas - since small, rural districts with one, two, or three schools can argue that they are already practicing school-based decisionmaking.

However, even in most rural and small school districts, authority continues to be exercised within a hierarchical structure. The key decisions are made by the superintendent and school board - not by teachers and principals. This type of centralized authority may not be an effective management strategy now that the education system seeks to teach thinking and problem solving skills to all students and expects all students to perform at high levels. Thus, decentralizing decision-making authority and responsibility to teachers and principals in rural districts still could represent a major innovation.

ILLUSTRATIVE CASES:

Chicago, IL, School Reform

Des Moines, IA, School Reform

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

NCREL Resource Center
North Central Regional Educational Laboratory
1120 Diehl Road, Suite 200
Naperville, IL 605631-1486
(630) 649-6500, E-mail: info@ncrel.org

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

References

Date posted: 1995