This action is the responsibility of both the central school board and each school site council. Building consensus can be achieved through an ongoing strategic planning system in which the needs and desires of the local, state, and national communities are assessed in the context of local conditions in the district and in each school. At the school board level, the result of this assessement could be a small set of specific goals for the district, plus agreement on the need to create and implement a decentralized, high-involvement management system to achieve these goals.
Within each school, consensus is both the prerequisite and the outcome of a comprehensive, shared decision-making process at the site. Teachers, parents, and community members need to help diagnose school problems so that they can understand why the school needs to restructure to accomplish its new and ambitious goals, and teachers in particular need to be centrally involved in designing the school and classroom organization, curriculum, and instruction strategies to accomplish these new goals. Involving all teachers in one or more teacher decision-making teams is an effective route toward teacher consensus on these large-school site changes.