The next time you read about a major new school reform initiative in a district, look hard for a mention of the local school board. Chances are you’ll find little to no information on what role the board played in championing the initiative, selling it to doubting members of the public, or making the difficult budgetary decisions to make it possible in the first place.
Chances are when you do read something about a local school board, it won’t be complimentary. School boards—made up of citizen-taxpayers tapped to govern local public schools—are routinely blamed for problems from passively accepting the status quo to aggressively putting personal agendas above sustained, strategic plans for systemic improvement.
Proposed solutions for these governance problems, however, usually center on changing the structure of the board or the means by which members are chosen: Boards, it is often suggested, would operate better if members were elected districtwide, or for longer terms or staggered terms, or if they were simply appointed instead of elected.
Unfortunately, there is very little research to tell us what makes boards effective. As a journalist and former school board member, I set out to identify boards across the country whose members had established a reputation for working successfully together to increase student achievement. What kinds of practices would these “high-functioning” school boards, as I called them, have in common? Tapping a variety of expert sources, I conducted interviews with board chairs in 16 different districts, ranging from rural districts (like Madison County, Ky., and Elk Mound, Wis.) to suburban districts (Calvert County, Md., and Berlin, Conn.) and urban areas (Boston and Atlanta). The sample included both appointed and elected boards.
As it turned out, strong patterns of common practices quickly became apparent (see sidebar “Common Practices of High-Functioning Boards”). Close SidebarCommon Practices of High-Functioning Boards
Norms and Values Documents These agreements delineate the roles of board members and superintendents, set behavioral expectations for members, and underline the board’s commitment to serve all children in a district.
Operating and Communication Protocols Protocols address important questions like: Who will speak for the entire board with the press? Under what circumstances can the agenda be changed by an individual member?
Goal-setting Retreats Formal meetings, often televised, are not good venues for in-depth discussions about what is needed to improve student achievement in the district. Goal-setting and other informal retreats lead to better communication, promote trust, and arm members with information they need to communicate effectively with the community.
Monitoring Mechanisms High-functioning board members and their superintendents often use targets, benchmarks, “data dashboards,” and other measures to monitor progress.
Meeting Agendas Tied to Goals Goals don’t get you very far unless monthly agendas reinforce the district’s priorities. Chairs often solicit ideas for presentations on different aspects of the goals and schedule discussions in advance.
Professional Development Board members are not always up to speed on the latest tests, curricula, or teaching practices. Professional development helps them understand new initiatives.
Shared Decision Making Getting the community—parents, professionals, and business groups, for example—involved in helping to solve district problems has become a priority for high-functioning boards.
Sustaining Progress Superintendent and board turnover is inevitable. High-functioning boards can sustain their success by enacting multiyear initiatives, conducting board candidate orientations, and creating board handbooks.
The Essential School Board Book: Better Governance in the Age of Accountability, by Nancy Walser. Foreword by Richard F. Elmore. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2009) $24.95. To order, call 1-888-437-1437 or visit www.harvardeducationpress.org.These boards face different challenges and have different structures, goals, meetings, and rules, yet a remarkable consensus exists among them about policies and practices that help them to focus their efforts—and those of their districts and communities—on how their students are doing.
As attorney Gary Brochu, president of the Berlin, Conn., school board—an elected board—put it: “It’s not structure that limits you; it’s what you do when you get on.”
From Overseers to Co-Leaders
The job of a school board member was pretty straightforward in the early days of U.S. public schools. According to George Emery Littlefield’s 1904 account Early Schools and School-Books of New England, the first school board members in Dorchester, Mass., chosen in 1645, had five duties during their lifetime terms: find an “able” schoolmaster, make sure he performed “faithfully,” arbitrate parent complaints, keep up the schoolhouse, and order enough wood for the winter. The Progressive Era of the late 19th century saw a shift to a more corporate model, in which board members were “overseers” of the top executive in charge, the superintendent.
The current era of accountability, however, demands more from both the superintendent and the board. With districts under pressure to raise achievement, a school board is dependent on the expert technical knowledge and leadership of its superintendent to make the requisite changes, while the superintendent needs the authority of the board members as leaders in their communities to make those changes stick. One party can’t do it without the other.
Focus and Communication
The central function of both parties in this new partnership is focusing their work and the work of the school district on student achievement. To do this, high-functioning school boards typically meet regularly with superintendents to set annual goals, review strategic plans for getting to the goals, and periodically monitor progress toward the goals. These retreats generally take place outside the board’s regularly scheduled meetings. High-functioning boards also work to engage the public in the central work of the district through focus groups and other means. The chairs (sometimes called “presidents”) of boards play an especially active role in keeping meeting agendas focused on the goals rather than on constituent issues that revolve around matters other than policy and budget.
Although school board members are elected or appointed as individuals, their power to make decisions for a district comes only as a result of a collective vote by the entire board. In addition, the public often judges the competence of a district based on the public behavior of a board—factionalism or divisiveness diminishes a board’s credibility as well as its effectiveness. Therefore, high-functioning boards also put a premium on collaboration, working out norms and values documents or “operating protocols” both to spell out the differences between the role of the policymaking body as distinct from the superintendent—or chief executive—and to spell out expectations for behavior from individuals on the board.
In Norfolk, Va., which won the Broad Prize for most improved urban school district in 2005, for example, one of the appointed school board’s four “Established Norms of Interaction” requires that all information requests of the administration are to be sent to the superintendent through the board chair. If “considerable work or time is required to generate the data, the full board must endorse the request,” the policy states.
Chances are when you do read something about a local school board, it won’t be complimentary. School boards—made up of citizen-taxpayers tapped to govern local public schools—are routinely blamed for problems from passively accepting the status quo to aggressively putting personal agendas above sustained, strategic plans for systemic improvement.
Proposed solutions for these governance problems, however, usually center on changing the structure of the board or the means by which members are chosen: Boards, it is often suggested, would operate better if members were elected districtwide, or for longer terms or staggered terms, or if they were simply appointed instead of elected.
Unfortunately, there is very little research to tell us what makes boards effective. As a journalist and former school board member, I set out to identify boards across the country whose members had established a reputation for working successfully together to increase student achievement. What kinds of practices would these “high-functioning” school boards, as I called them, have in common? Tapping a variety of expert sources, I conducted interviews with board chairs in 16 different districts, ranging from rural districts (like Madison County, Ky., and Elk Mound, Wis.) to suburban districts (Calvert County, Md., and Berlin, Conn.) and urban areas (Boston and Atlanta). The sample included both appointed and elected boards.
As it turned out, strong patterns of common practices quickly became apparent (see sidebar “Common Practices of High-Functioning Boards”). Close SidebarCommon Practices of High-Functioning Boards
Norms and Values Documents These agreements delineate the roles of board members and superintendents, set behavioral expectations for members, and underline the board’s commitment to serve all children in a district.
Operating and Communication Protocols Protocols address important questions like: Who will speak for the entire board with the press? Under what circumstances can the agenda be changed by an individual member?
Goal-setting Retreats Formal meetings, often televised, are not good venues for in-depth discussions about what is needed to improve student achievement in the district. Goal-setting and other informal retreats lead to better communication, promote trust, and arm members with information they need to communicate effectively with the community.
Monitoring Mechanisms High-functioning board members and their superintendents often use targets, benchmarks, “data dashboards,” and other measures to monitor progress.
Meeting Agendas Tied to Goals Goals don’t get you very far unless monthly agendas reinforce the district’s priorities. Chairs often solicit ideas for presentations on different aspects of the goals and schedule discussions in advance.
Professional Development Board members are not always up to speed on the latest tests, curricula, or teaching practices. Professional development helps them understand new initiatives.
Shared Decision Making Getting the community—parents, professionals, and business groups, for example—involved in helping to solve district problems has become a priority for high-functioning boards.
Sustaining Progress Superintendent and board turnover is inevitable. High-functioning boards can sustain their success by enacting multiyear initiatives, conducting board candidate orientations, and creating board handbooks.
The Essential School Board Book: Better Governance in the Age of Accountability, by Nancy Walser. Foreword by Richard F. Elmore. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2009) $24.95. To order, call 1-888-437-1437 or visit www.harvardeducationpress.org.These boards face different challenges and have different structures, goals, meetings, and rules, yet a remarkable consensus exists among them about policies and practices that help them to focus their efforts—and those of their districts and communities—on how their students are doing.
As attorney Gary Brochu, president of the Berlin, Conn., school board—an elected board—put it: “It’s not structure that limits you; it’s what you do when you get on.”
From Overseers to Co-Leaders
The job of a school board member was pretty straightforward in the early days of U.S. public schools. According to George Emery Littlefield’s 1904 account Early Schools and School-Books of New England, the first school board members in Dorchester, Mass., chosen in 1645, had five duties during their lifetime terms: find an “able” schoolmaster, make sure he performed “faithfully,” arbitrate parent complaints, keep up the schoolhouse, and order enough wood for the winter. The Progressive Era of the late 19th century saw a shift to a more corporate model, in which board members were “overseers” of the top executive in charge, the superintendent.
The current era of accountability, however, demands more from both the superintendent and the board. With districts under pressure to raise achievement, a school board is dependent on the expert technical knowledge and leadership of its superintendent to make the requisite changes, while the superintendent needs the authority of the board members as leaders in their communities to make those changes stick. One party can’t do it without the other.
Focus and Communication
The central function of both parties in this new partnership is focusing their work and the work of the school district on student achievement. To do this, high-functioning school boards typically meet regularly with superintendents to set annual goals, review strategic plans for getting to the goals, and periodically monitor progress toward the goals. These retreats generally take place outside the board’s regularly scheduled meetings. High-functioning boards also work to engage the public in the central work of the district through focus groups and other means. The chairs (sometimes called “presidents”) of boards play an especially active role in keeping meeting agendas focused on the goals rather than on constituent issues that revolve around matters other than policy and budget.
Although school board members are elected or appointed as individuals, their power to make decisions for a district comes only as a result of a collective vote by the entire board. In addition, the public often judges the competence of a district based on the public behavior of a board—factionalism or divisiveness diminishes a board’s credibility as well as its effectiveness. Therefore, high-functioning boards also put a premium on collaboration, working out norms and values documents or “operating protocols” both to spell out the differences between the role of the policymaking body as distinct from the superintendent—or chief executive—and to spell out expectations for behavior from individuals on the board.
In Norfolk, Va., which won the Broad Prize for most improved urban school district in 2005, for example, one of the appointed school board’s four “Established Norms of Interaction” requires that all information requests of the administration are to be sent to the superintendent through the board chair. If “considerable work or time is required to generate the data, the full board must endorse the request,” the policy states.
Learning the Hard Way
Many boards have learned the hard way, through times of dysfunction, about what kinds of structures and policies can help them stay on track as a board. In Atlanta, years of mismanagement led the state legislature to pass a law limiting the powers of the Atlanta School Board—an elected board—and establishing an ethics policy and commission to hear complaints. A number of policy changes—some mandated by the 2003 law as well as others subsequently set up by the board—helped the board and superintendent to focus on teaching, learning, and other needed reforms. Limits on the number of subcommittees, for example, have helped the board focus on its primary responsibilities—setting policy, approving and monitoring the budget, and evaluating the superintendent—while freeing the superintendent and her staff from the demands of preparing for and attending a plethora of meetings.
The school board and the superintendent have also worked together to put a strategic plan in place. In quarterly retreats, the board monitors progress toward specific targets outlined in the strategic plan using a “balanced scorecard” system. Each target is color coded to tell members whether the district is on track. The board also limited the number of voting meetings and created “Committee of the Whole” meetings in order to talk with the superintendent about critical issues in more depth.
Board Development
Under the overseer model of the last century, desirable board members—generally drawn from the worlds of academia and business—were assumed to have the knowledge needed to lead the district, based on their position in life and contacts in the community.
To be leaders in this century, however, high-functioning school boards train themselves continually in areas ranging from data use to media relations and community engagement. Whether through in-house workshops led by administrators, attendance at the national and/or state school board association workshops and annual conventions, online courses on board association Web sites, or in-depth relationships with consultants or facilitators, these boards see learning as essential to doing their job well.
In 2006, the Elk Mound board—an elected board—volunteered to be one of six Wisconsin districts to pilot test board training developed by the Lighthouse Project, an ongoing research project sponsored by the Iowa School Boards Association. A data specialist assisted the board with analysis of results on state and local benchmark tests and other data, helping them to understand and ask critical questions about apparent gaps in learning as well as make decisions about budget allocations. Board members also learned strategies for enhancing their outreach efforts. A board newsletter is mailed to every household in the district each month and posted on the school district Web site. A pamphlet with the district’s vision, core values, and six goals—with action steps devised by the administration for reaching the goals—is also distributed.
All of this groundwork proved valuable in 2009 when district leaders realized that growing enrollments and aging facilities meant all three of the district’s schools had become inadequate. On April 7, 2009, when job losses around the country were making headlines, the $9.3 million referendum passed. Referendums in four other neighboring districts held on the same day were voted down.
After the groundwork of good governance is laid, high-functioning boards typically find ways to institutionalize what is working well and sustain momentum toward goals in the face of inevitable changes in district leadership. When faced with a turnover of the majority of the elected board due to term limits and retirements, for example, Calvert County, Md., board members wrote a handbook to codify the ways they went about working with their superintendent and challenged future board members to keep the handbook updated.
Untapped Power
School boards have been overlooked as partners in reform, and yet stories of high-functioning boards show that when they are involved constructively and appropriately in focusing the attention of the district on student achievement, great things happen. As one board member told me, “School boards have extraordinary power that’s not [always] tapped into.”
When the school board in Madison County, Ky., took the advice of its superintendent to voluntarily submit to a state review, it was told that part of the problem of underachievement in the district was the board’s own “lack of urgency.” Not only did the elected board adopt the state’s recommendations as its improvement plan, overhauling its meeting agendas to keep tabs on district progress, but board chair Doug Whitlock, president of Eastern Kentucky University, joined the team of state-appointed advisers that began meeting regularly with every principal. When teachers called board members to complain about classroom walkthroughs by administrators and new formative assessments, the board backed the superintendent’s plans. For superintendent Tommy Floyd, the board’s attitude made all the difference. “We had some resistance, but the board said, ‘I’m very sorry, but student achievement is number one.’ Everything from that point on enabled the superintendent and everybody else to focus on that.” Four years after the advisory team began its work, the district had made AYP in all categories, and elementary achievement had soared above national and state norms.
At a time when publicly elected boards still govern the vast majority of districts, and when every community resource needs to be marshaled to prepare students for the 21st century, high-functioning school boards can be invaluable assets in leading and supporting school reform. Educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and interested citizens should be aware that there is a way to put local politics (“with a little p,” to quote one member) to work for students. School board members in particular need to know about these practices. They need to know that what they do—and what they don’t—can limit the success of their students.
Nancy Walser is the assistant editor of the Harvard Education Letter and author of The Essential School Board Book: Better Governance in the Age of Accountability, to be published in October 2009 by Harvard Education Press.
Many boards have learned the hard way, through times of dysfunction, about what kinds of structures and policies can help them stay on track as a board. In Atlanta, years of mismanagement led the state legislature to pass a law limiting the powers of the Atlanta School Board—an elected board—and establishing an ethics policy and commission to hear complaints. A number of policy changes—some mandated by the 2003 law as well as others subsequently set up by the board—helped the board and superintendent to focus on teaching, learning, and other needed reforms. Limits on the number of subcommittees, for example, have helped the board focus on its primary responsibilities—setting policy, approving and monitoring the budget, and evaluating the superintendent—while freeing the superintendent and her staff from the demands of preparing for and attending a plethora of meetings.
The school board and the superintendent have also worked together to put a strategic plan in place. In quarterly retreats, the board monitors progress toward specific targets outlined in the strategic plan using a “balanced scorecard” system. Each target is color coded to tell members whether the district is on track. The board also limited the number of voting meetings and created “Committee of the Whole” meetings in order to talk with the superintendent about critical issues in more depth.
Board Development
Under the overseer model of the last century, desirable board members—generally drawn from the worlds of academia and business—were assumed to have the knowledge needed to lead the district, based on their position in life and contacts in the community.
To be leaders in this century, however, high-functioning school boards train themselves continually in areas ranging from data use to media relations and community engagement. Whether through in-house workshops led by administrators, attendance at the national and/or state school board association workshops and annual conventions, online courses on board association Web sites, or in-depth relationships with consultants or facilitators, these boards see learning as essential to doing their job well.
In 2006, the Elk Mound board—an elected board—volunteered to be one of six Wisconsin districts to pilot test board training developed by the Lighthouse Project, an ongoing research project sponsored by the Iowa School Boards Association. A data specialist assisted the board with analysis of results on state and local benchmark tests and other data, helping them to understand and ask critical questions about apparent gaps in learning as well as make decisions about budget allocations. Board members also learned strategies for enhancing their outreach efforts. A board newsletter is mailed to every household in the district each month and posted on the school district Web site. A pamphlet with the district’s vision, core values, and six goals—with action steps devised by the administration for reaching the goals—is also distributed.
All of this groundwork proved valuable in 2009 when district leaders realized that growing enrollments and aging facilities meant all three of the district’s schools had become inadequate. On April 7, 2009, when job losses around the country were making headlines, the $9.3 million referendum passed. Referendums in four other neighboring districts held on the same day were voted down.
After the groundwork of good governance is laid, high-functioning boards typically find ways to institutionalize what is working well and sustain momentum toward goals in the face of inevitable changes in district leadership. When faced with a turnover of the majority of the elected board due to term limits and retirements, for example, Calvert County, Md., board members wrote a handbook to codify the ways they went about working with their superintendent and challenged future board members to keep the handbook updated.
Untapped Power
School boards have been overlooked as partners in reform, and yet stories of high-functioning boards show that when they are involved constructively and appropriately in focusing the attention of the district on student achievement, great things happen. As one board member told me, “School boards have extraordinary power that’s not [always] tapped into.”
When the school board in Madison County, Ky., took the advice of its superintendent to voluntarily submit to a state review, it was told that part of the problem of underachievement in the district was the board’s own “lack of urgency.” Not only did the elected board adopt the state’s recommendations as its improvement plan, overhauling its meeting agendas to keep tabs on district progress, but board chair Doug Whitlock, president of Eastern Kentucky University, joined the team of state-appointed advisers that began meeting regularly with every principal. When teachers called board members to complain about classroom walkthroughs by administrators and new formative assessments, the board backed the superintendent’s plans. For superintendent Tommy Floyd, the board’s attitude made all the difference. “We had some resistance, but the board said, ‘I’m very sorry, but student achievement is number one.’ Everything from that point on enabled the superintendent and everybody else to focus on that.” Four years after the advisory team began its work, the district had made AYP in all categories, and elementary achievement had soared above national and state norms.
At a time when publicly elected boards still govern the vast majority of districts, and when every community resource needs to be marshaled to prepare students for the 21st century, high-functioning school boards can be invaluable assets in leading and supporting school reform. Educators, administrators, policymakers, parents, and interested citizens should be aware that there is a way to put local politics (“with a little p,” to quote one member) to work for students. School board members in particular need to know about these practices. They need to know that what they do—and what they don’t—can limit the success of their students.
Nancy Walser is the assistant editor of the Harvard Education Letter and author of The Essential School Board Book: Better Governance in the Age of Accountability, to be published in October 2009 by Harvard Education Press.
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