Executive Director's Report: Changing the way we do business
By Anne L. Bryant
08/23/05 -- During the summer months, your state school boards association’s elected leaders are busy at work in an additional leadership role that goes far beyond local “school boarding.” They and the executive directors of each state association attend one of five NSBA regional meetings on state association leadership.
It is my privilege to attend these meetings, along with the NSBA officers and regional directors and my colleague Dick Anderson, associate executive director for Federation Member services.
What we do at these meetings varies from year to year. This summer, during the NSBA portion of the meeting, we focused on NSBA’s number-one strategic goal: “Every school board will lead its community to ensure that all students succeed in a rapidly changing, global society.”
At each regional meeting, we invited two state associations to present an overview of their school board training. We selected states whose governance curriculum has been transformed in the past few years to focus on student achievement and community engagement.
We heard very impressive stories from the six states that have made presentations to date: Oregon, Idaho, Indiana, Michigan, Arkansas, and Alabama. And I’m sure we will be equally impressed when we hear from Nebraska, Montana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland at regional meetings scheduled for September and October.
The main message from these sessions is: State school boards associations are changing the way they do business. They have recognized that governing in today’s world demands a new way of leading. Gone are the days when the superintendent developed the agenda with no input from the board, and the agenda focused on an interesting, but not noteworthy, item -- new features in the bus contract, for example, or the school sports mascot, the color of the new gymnasium, or, my favorite, redistricting.
Now sometimes these issues can be contentious or important to a few people. But in and of themselves, they are not focused on a board’s main mission -- to raise student achievement in the broadest sense of the word.
In contrast to the “not so good old days,” the Indiana School Boards Association is realigning its board development work with the Key Work of School Boards, the governance framework that has as its centerpiece the goal of raising student achievement.
For new School Board News readers, the Key Work was developed in 1998 by a group of school board members, state association leaders, and NSBA staff and board members.
It provides boards with an eight-point framework for creating a vision for the school district. (Learn more about the Key Work at www.nsba.org/keywork2.)
The process begins with community input and includes establishing standards or goals; determining how well the district assesses or measures progress toward those goals; and creating accountability systems for staff, teachers, students, and even school board members. Aligning the district’s resources -- human and financial -- with the goals is the board’s toughest job.
Collaborating with the community, creating a healthy climate for teaching and learning, and, finally, continuous improvement complete the cycle.
At the Central Region meeting, leaders of the Indiana School Boards Association described how they have developed three levels of boardsmanship training to ensure that new and seasoned boards are continually learning new skills.
The Michigan Association of School Boards has created an academy to inspire those board members who “thought they knew it all” to continue their learning using new tools, such as “Data 2 Results,” a data-driven framework for decision making developed by Standard & Poor’s.
At the Pacific Region meeting, leaders of the Idaho and Oregon associations talked about their participation in a consortium of eight state school boards associations and NSBA to mine the research findings of an excellent program called the Lighthouse Project.
The project, developed by the Iowa Association of School Boards, is based on a study comparing school boards in highly effective districts -- which had made strong gains in achievement and in closing the achievement gap -- with boards in low-achieving districts that had similar student populations. [See a previous Executive Director’s report on this project in the Aug. 24, 2004, School Board News, www.nsba.org/ sbn.]
The difference between the two groups was huge. The boards in high-achieving districts focused on student achievement and had high expectations for all students. The districts’ goals were well known and used throughout the system. These boards used the goals to drive decision making, and they measured the progress toward achieving them.
The Idaho and Oregon state associations also are using this research and learning to change their training to focus boards on student achievement.
The Southern Region meeting is unique. Instead of serving just the elected and staff leadership of the 12 states in the region, it is open to all school board members from these states. This year, almost 900 school board members from across the South attended a power-packed, three-day summer conference.
During the leadership meeting at the conference, leaders of the Alabama and Arkansas associations described how their school board training programs are dramatically changing.
The Arkansas School Boards Association began its redesign efforts several years ago, taking four elements of the Key Work and combining them with a program called Study Circles to further strengthen the collaboration and community engagement aspects of the Key Work. [See the June 4, 2002, School Board News.]
In addition, the association has pushed for whole board-superintendent development, believing as I do that change will only happen when the entire board-superintendent team is on the same page.
The Alabama Association of School Boards has recently taken the Key Work and refocused its board training on the eight-part framework. Joe Villani, deputy executive director of NSBA and an instrumental contributor to the Key Work, helped launch this new program at the Summer Leadership Conference. So, stay tuned to Alabama.
Why am I so excited about these state associations and many others like them? Because they are changing the way they do business. The stakes are higher. More focused, powerful governance is needed -- not less.
To ensure that all children are getting the education they will need to be successful in a rapidly changing global society, school boards must provide strong leadership, ask the tough questions, demand data and research to help them make the right decisions, and, most important, reach out to communities to engage the American public in their public schools.
Bravo to our state associations -- and especially those leading the effort to change governance training so that school boards are the powerhouse behind all students achieving.
| Reproduced with permission from School Board News. Copyright © 2005, National School Boards Association. Opinions expressed in this newspaper do not necessarily reflect positions of NSBA. This article may be printed out and photocopied for individual or educational use, provided this copyright notice appears on each copy. This article may not be otherwise transmitted or reproduced in print or electronic form without the consent of the Publisher. For more information, call (703) 838-6789. |