In the future, education governance will become much more complicated, will involve delegating decisionmaking, and will require more power sharing both within education (e.g., site-based management) and among education and other government systems (e.g., coordinated children's services). School boards will need to be involved in setting goals and determining directions; engaging in strategic planning to implement these goals and move in specific directions; stimulating curriculum development aligned with national, state, and professional curriculum standards and creating staff development structures to enable teachers to teach these curricula; and designing mechanisms for restructuring education systems and changing school management.
To accomplish these broad new objectives, school boards will need to develop local education goals that are consistent with state and federal education goals; create coherent policy to link these goals with local curriculum, categorical program requirements, student testing, and teacher professional development; design site-based management and organization structures consistent with the need for high-performance schools across the district; implement an assessment and indicator system to track school and district progress toward these goals; develop a process for periodically reviewing each school's performance; and design a phased-in assistance/intervention program for schools in which performance lags. School boards also need to develop strategies for keeping abreast of the evolving education reform agenda.
Indeed, even the National School Boards Association (NSBA) has urged school boards to consider these issues when attempting to make policy for a "local school system." Alternatively, NSBA suggests that school boards view themselves as responsible for a "system of high- performance schools" and that they accomplish these goals through an aggressive "contracting out" or charter schools strategy.