(49 Questions to Ask Your Board)
Are the means that the administration uses in reaching the desired ends beyond the scope of the school board’s concerns? Of course not. The methods should be fair and ethical. They should be affordable. They should be gauged against the best interests of students, taxpayers and staff. A school board that turns its back on questionable practices that lead to desired results is derelict in its duty.
― Gene Maeroff1
The board continuously connects with its community to listen and learn values that will guide the district in creating optimal conditions for teaching and learning, and ultimately delivering outcomes for students. Values guide not only what is to be achieved, but how to pursue that achievement in a way that is acceptable within the community. The board authentically expresses those values in its policies and through its advocacy efforts.
Words contained in written policy or its efforts to influence others are not enough. Board behavior – board culture – must reflect and reinforce them.
You will most often hear it suggested that a school board’s greatest power to impact student learning is centered in its ability to set policy. I used to be among those who believed this. My experience, however, has taught me a more consistent reality: culture trumps policy every day.
― AJ Crabill2
Scenario: It was time for annual evaluation. The superintendent was finishing her third year of district transformation. She had been hired to make serious changes and had proceeded to take unpopular but needed steps to turn things around, replacing some ineffective principals, facing down PTA and union leadership, and demanding accountability. This, along with a revamped professional development regimen, was beginning to show signs of progress, with recent test scores showing an upward trend after years of decline. Recently a parent group had stormed into the board room to protest the departure of a popular high school principal who had not supported the superintendent’s decisions. When the board and superintendent emerged from their closed-door annual evaluation session the board considered a motion to accept the superintendent’s resignation. There was no discussion, followed by a 5-0 vote in favor of the motion.
This board was not prepared to back up a superintendent who was courageously doing its bidding. It failed to support her when competing adult interests surfaced. These interests were in conflict with hard decisions about student outcomes. Dusting off the board’s professed values might be in order, as values in conflict are what make hard decisions hard.
The importance of this task. To carry out the will of the community the board must build a foundation of public trust; establish an ongoing connection with community members by listening to them and understanding their values; give strategic voice to those values by incorporating them into the board’s own declared district values, communicating them internally through policy; and express those values externally through advocacy directed toward members of the public, policymakers, and others at local, state, and national levels who can positively impact the district’s ability to meet student needs.
Board policies, when they express community values around truly strategic issues and are reinforced by consistent board behavior, help to create a culture that operates as a continuous guidance system even at times when the board is absent. Since the board is absent most of the time between meetings, the importance of its authentic written policy voice is significant. This is a major reason why the board should clearly distinguish strategic policies (those that communicate what is to be done, and why) from operational policies (those that communicate how the work is to be done.) The latter offer detailed instructions for the many mundane but necessary functions of an organization. The former help to create the district culture.
“Think of culture as the values and beliefs that shape the school district’s behaviors, creating the conditions for teaching and learning. Those conditions are the climate. Climate is the product of culture.”
― Katherine Gemberling3
Values help create a culture that guides an organization’s actions even when the leader is not present.
On 9/11, when the planes hit the World Trade Center, the CEO of a big U.S. technology company was on a plane to Asia. When she heard the news upon landing, she immediately tried to get in touch with her office in California, but thanks to the jammed phone lines and the sixteen-hour time difference, it was several hours before she could get through to her senior team. When she did get them on a conference call, she laid out three immediate priorities for them: (1) Immediately account for every employee and ensure they are all safe; (2) Ensure that the company’s Web site and servers – the core of their business – are secure; (3) Begin organizing a charity auction in order to support victims and their families. After a brief silence on the other end of the line, someone in the conference room informed the CEO that the three priorities had not only been identified, the first two had already been completed and the third was well on its way…This was the company’s culture at work! Culture is what your people do when no one is looking.
― Rajeev Peshawaria4
Many values are contained in board policy, and although broad value statements may appear similar from district to district, the particulars should be tailored to fit the community’s character, and as mentioned previously, board behavior must align with those written values.
Values should not be prescribed from outside, so I will not present a list for all boards to use. However, in a publicly owned institution such as a school district, one non-negotiable value that supports all others because it builds public trust is transparency. Rather than a list of recommended values, what is important is the board-community connection that uncovers those values.
The effective board operates in a transparent manner. It establishes an ongoing connection with its community, listening time and again to community members who are repeatedly invited to share what matters most in terms of (first) desired outcomes for students and (second) how those outcomes are pursued. Distilling this community input into values statements should be a continuous activity, creating and constantly reviewing/refining them to ensure they remain the most current and accurate expression of community values and priorities. These statements of community values inform policy that expresses them internally, and advocacy that expresses them externally to policymakers and members of the public
Values consists of 4 elements: Transparency; Board-Community Connection; Policy as the Community’s Internal Voice; and Advocacy as the Community’s External Voice.
NOTE: Please feel free to comment. The opinions expressed in these blog entries are informed by references cited herein, and the experiences of the author. Your comments are welcome additions to the conversation.
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Excerpt from:
- A Framework for School Governance (2017), Rick Maloney
References;
- 1School Boards in America: A Flawed Exercise in Democracy (2010) Gene Maeroff
- 2https://www.k12digest.com/culture-policy-creating-the-conditions-to-improve-student-outcomes , Culture & Policy: Creating the Conditions to Improve Student Outcomes, K12 Digest, (2024) A.J. Crabill retrieved May 2024
- 3The Key Work of School Boards (2009) Katherine Gemberling et al
- 4Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (2011) Rajeev Peshawaria
Next: Question #19 – Does Your Board Value Transparency?