View takeover talk as an opportunity, not a threat, Usdan says

“We’re in the era of new educational politics where business and political elites became involved in education in unprecedented ways,” says Usdan, who delivered the sixth annual Jacqueline P. Danzberger Memorial Lecture April 10.

Usdan, the retired president of the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), also is a former commissioner of higher education for the state of Connecticut and a former president of the New Rochelle, N.Y., school board.

Danzberger collaborated with Usdan for more than two decades at IEL on various school leadership projects. She was director of governance programs at IEL from 1983 until her death in 2000. Previously she had been a local school board member in Connecticut and was president of the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education.

Usdan told the audience at the lecture that much of the education reform movement in recent years has been generated by business groups, such as chambers of commerce and state business roundtables, and politically elected groups, such as the National Conference of State Legislators, the National Governors Association, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

“Many in traditional educational governance have not liked this development very much,” he says. “School boards, superintendents, teachers, and principals in many ways have been pre-empted by this new politics.”

But Usdan does not see this development as a threat. He calls it “a marvelous opportunity for school boards to redefine their roles and responsibilities, to take advantage of this profound and deep interest.”

Business leaders and politicians’ interest in school reform “represents an enormous development because it has put education on the front burner of domestic American politics in ways that is has never been before,” Usdan says.

He advises school boards to take on a greater political -- but nonpartisan -- role and to give their administrators more authority.

“Don’t worry about whether the muffins are hot in the cafeteria or whether the buses are running on time,” Usdan says. “Worry about building external constituencies in your communities with your senior citizens, the media, and the public. If the administrators can’t keep the muffins hot and the buses on time, get somebody else.”

He urges school board members “to generate greater distance between you and the professional administrators you hire.”

“There needs to be more space” between board members and the professional staff, he says. “School board members should be brokers who translate between the schools and the larger society.”

For school boards to successfully redefine their roles, they will have to overcome what Usdan calls a lack of confidence in governance at all levels.

“Local school boards are in the center of this caldron of antigovernment sentiment,” he says. “When people are frustrated with the state capitol or Washington, they’ll take it out on you.”

He also urged school board members to correct the public’s “profound civic ignorance” of what school boards do.

Usdan believes school boards should concentrate on “budgeting, resource allocation, and goal setting” and “should stay out of everything else. . . . That is enough of an agenda. Board members are elected to be leaders, not naggers.”

Praising NSBA’s framework for school board leadership, the Key Work of School Boards, Usdan says, “certainly, it’s the right way to go. Indeed this focus will enhance the influence of boards.”

Although much of the school reform movement has bypassed school boards -- “correctly or incorrectly, they are seen as part of the problem, not the solution” -- Usdan believes school boards will remain significant.