Boards Matter – Part II
…we found five district-level leadership “responsibilities” or “initiatives” with a statistically significant (p < .05) correlation with average student achievement.
- Ensuring collaborative goal setting.
- Establishing nonnegotiable goals for achievement and instruction.
- Creating board alignment with and support of district goals.
- Monitoring achievement and instruction goals.
- Allocating resources to support the goals for achievement and instruction.
Timothy Waters and Robert Marzano, District Leadership That Works
The board influences student learning through district-level leadership
Can board leadership positively affect student learning? Close reading of a meta-analysis of research conducted by the Mid-Continent Regional Education Laboratory leads to a conclusion that the answer is yes.
In their report District Leadership That Works, Dr. Timothy Waters and Robert Marzano were interested in the superintendent’s impact on student learning. They therefore wrote their findings in terms of superintendent leadership.
Yet district-level responsibilities include those related to the board’s leadership role. I therefore disagree with those who would restrict the above findings to superintendent leadership alone. The board can and should take responsibility for seeing that these five significant district-level strategies are not only initiated, but are sustained over time, from one superintendent to another.
Board actions have an effect on those of the superintendent, and that effect “trickles down” through district administrators to the classroom. The bottom line is that for student learning, boards matter. When we consider research into the influence of district leadership, and the close relationship between boards and superintendents, we can learn even more about the board’s potential for positive impact, working as it does through the superintendent.