Boards Matter – Part III
In the high-achieving districts, the board/superintendent team and school personnel consistently expressed an “elevating” view of students. Students were viewed as emerging and flexible and the school’s job was seen as releasing each student’s potential.
Bartusek, L (ed.), Iowa School Board COMPASS: A Guide for Those Who Lead
Board beliefs/behaviors correlate with student learning.
Research specifically looking at school board effectiveness (the Iowa studies conducted in the late 1990s and subsequent work over the next decade) reveals a significant correlation between the board’s beliefs about their students’ capacity for learning and the measurement of student learning. Boards with elevating beliefs about their students’ ability are associated with higher levels of student achievement when compared with boards from communities with similar demographics.
Additional study (Iowa, Stage II) identified five main roles of a board that are positively correlated with student achievement:
- Set clear expectations
- Hold themselves and the district staff accountable for meeting the expectations
- Ensure conditions for success were present
- Build the collective will of the staff and the community to improve student learning
- Learn together as a board team
The board-superintendent team influences student learning.
As mentioned in Part II, Waters and Marzano argue that effective district-level leadership makes a difference even in the face of a status quo mentality that can be an obstacle to reform. Specifically calling out a mentality that clings to the status quo, former Education Secretary William Bennett labeled an intransigent state and district bureaucracy the blob. Alan Hafer refers to a similar obstacle as the paradigm, and urged school boards to confront it:
…boards of education must demand that the antiquated paradigm no longer be protected by unions, associations, politicians, tenure, administrators, and school systems. School board members should ensure effective pedagogical practices are learned, and practiced, by educators…School board members must demand that teachers and administrators zealously believe that all children can and must learn.
Although not inherently well suited to deliver best instructional or managerial practices, work for which we hire professionally prepared staff, boards are uniquely equipped with the necessary authority to demand that such practices be implemented, and to monitor and enforce implementation over the long haul, for as long as it takes to ensure such reforms are followed through to completion.