By Anne L. Bryant
8/24/04 -- Each summer while many people take well-deserved vacations, state school boards association executive directors meet for three and a-half days to learn, share, and enhance their own professional development.
The focus of the NSBA Executive Directors' Institute is on association management and leadership, trends in public education, and most important, how state leaders and their associations can help their members -- local school board leaders -- have a greater impact on raising student achievement.
This summer's institute was no exception. In fact, according to the evaluations NSBA tabulates, this meeting was the most highly rated ever.
Our state associations vary in size from a few with two-person staffs to the Texas Association of School Boards with nearly 480 employees (including 200 in the association's risk management service).
The executive directors' expertise varies but they all share a commitment to providing high-quality programs for school board leaders. During the institute sessions, the executives learn from one another -- they call it "legal stealing" -- about the best programs and practices they might want to adapt in their own states.
Ron Rice, the executive director of the Iowa Association of School Boards (IASB), described the Lighthouse Project, initiated three years ago, a study of school districts that were able to do a much better job of raising student performance for all socioeconomic groups than other districts with similar demographics. The study examined school boards' knowledge, behavior, and expectations.
The results were stunning. In the high-performing districts, the boards were engaged, focused on raising student achievement, data driven, deeply involved in their goals, knew what was happening in each school, and cared about the professional environment of teachers and staff.
In the low-achieving districts, there was a lack of expectations. School board members gave excuses, such as poverty and lack of parent involvement, for students' low achievement levels. The bottom line: A board's work made a difference.
That initial study led IASB to change the nature of its services, training, and development programs to focus on helping school boards change the nature of their work.
Learning about the Iowa association's journey through this process was an eye-opener for the state executive directors.
At another session, Clifford Green, executive director of the Idaho School Boards Association (ISBA), described a statewide initiative to improve data collection, raise student achievement, and reduce achievement gaps in reading and math.
In addition to ISBA, the initiative includes the governor, legislature, state board, state superintendent, and district leaders, with support from the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation. The teamwork among all the players is challenging but ISBA is committed to this huge undertaking.
In Wisconsin, Executive Director Ken Cole and the association's board of directors are working to incorporate the goals of raising student achievement and eliminating the learning gap into the association's culture, including board development, conference programming, and policies.
The association also is considering working with the Wisconsin Public Policy Institute to study the effectiveness of the Direct Instruction technique in raising the performing of struggling students.
And the good ideas did not stop there. Sessions led by Oklahoma and Connecticut examined personnel performance evaluation. Maine, Georgia, and Missouri led sessions on board/ executive director communications and external management and operations reviews, a program offered by NSBA.
These reviews are conducted by an external team of NSBA and state association "auditors," or peer management consultants, who write a report to the association's board of directors on their findings. In the spirit of continuous improvement, many state associations have requested these reviews over the years.
Another session dealt with an initiative of the Learning First Alliance, a coalition of 12 education organizations here in the Washington, D.C., area, including NSBA, on recruiting and retaining effective teachers and leaders for high-poverty, low-performing schools.
This effort focuses on the teamwork needed to construct the "four walls" necessary to make these schools places where effective professionals want to work.
It will not surprise School Board News readers to learn these walls are strong school leadership, high-quality working conditions, professional support that focuses on student achievement, and incentives to compensate staff for tougher assignments.
These walls must be built on a "floor" consisting of supportive policies, strong hiring and placement, teacher and staff preparation, and, last but not least, adequate funding.
A great discussion among the 38 state leaders at the Executive Directors' Institute will help NSBA contribute our perspective on this initiative and help the Learning First Alliance move this critical agenda forward.
Of course, a meeting of the state school boards associations would not be complete without a lengthy discussion of federal issues, such as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), and funding.
School board members have an active interest in these issues, which affect every district, every day. School board advocacy has made a difference, and we will continue to push for additional changes in the NCLB regulations and in the IDEA reauthorization, which has yet to be passed, and, of course, adequate funding levels.
We also heard reports about two regional conferences on celebrating educational opportunities of Hispanic students.
Hundreds of school board members, district leaders, and teachers come to these conferences -- one sponsored by four states in the Southwest and another by four states in the Northwest -- to share information on best practices for closing the achieving gap, especially for English language learners.
The amazing thing is I could go on and on about the Executive Directors' Institute. For three and a-half days, from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., association leaders worked hard to focus their creative juices on new programs and to improve the services they provide to you -- local school board members -- who, in turn, are focused on student achievement. It's a powerful united Federation serving our nation's 47 million schoolchildren.