Question #35 – Does Your Board Set Expectations for Management?

Rick Maloney

(49 Questions to Ask Your Board)

Superintendent job performance will be monitored systematically only against the Superintendent’s job expectations, which are reasonable progress toward organizational accomplishment of the Fundamentals stated in Board Policy 1800 OE-1, and the organizational operation within the boundaries established in the other Operational Expectations set forth in Board Policy 1800.

― Mercer Island SD1

Written policies such as the example shown above direct and guide the superintendent’s actions on a continuous basis by establishing clear expectations. Because the board cannot be present at all times to respond to specific contingencies, this guidance must be in written form, expressed in terms of broad values and principles.

Policy guidance that directs the superintendent as CEO is not easy to find in the typical board policy manual. The reason for this is that most policies are designed to direct the most minute details of staff activity, including how to request vacation time, how to coordinate student travel, how to process student disciplinary matters, etc. All these matters are important, but policymaking in this case is more accurately described as board approval of the superintendent’s operational guidance to staff. Strategic guidance may be found in various written forms. If the district has a strategic plan, it includes goals that are to be achieved for student learning and strategies that are being employed to achieve those goals. The superintendent contract contains language describing the board-superintendent relationship and the superintendent’s role. The superintendent’s job description provides a detailed layout of essential elements of the job and tasks to be performed. The policy on superintendent evaluation describes performance expectations and data-informed measures of success.

The board directs the superintendent in several ways: assigning responsibilities, setting policy, approving resolutions, and voting on motions made in meetings. Because it is a part-time body the board gives most of its guidance in written form. Many boards commit to the proposition that only written guidance is binding on the superintendent, through documents such as the superintendent contract, the job description, strategic plans, board policies, budget documents, and board resolutions.

As mentioned earlier, most board policies found in a traditional policy manual have developed over time into extensive and lumbering rules reflecting state, federal, and local notions about managing the district. Policy books, usually five or more inches thick and hundreds of pages long, are often filled with language dictated from outside the district, and if slavishly followed they make a mockery of the idea of local control. Also diminishing the board’s role in guiding management is a tendency on the part of many boards to passively wait for the superintendent to take the initiative.

Scenario: After considerable lobbying by the business community, graduation requirements in the State were raised to include a senior/culminating project. It was understood that the project would be selected by the student and approved by a designated member of the staff, that it would require considerable time to accomplish, and would combine all the student’s academic skills learned to date. It was also seen by the business community as a pathway to preparing students to enter the workforce once they left school. According to the law, school boards were required to develop specific implementation policies which would closely match projects to the needs of businesses in their communities. Well, it didn’t work that way. Boards for the most part left implementation up to the teaching staff, getting involved only superficially. With little or no background knowledge related to how the average office worker performs a project, over half of the teachers in the state treated the new law as a major inconvenience and simply reduced the requirement to a “portfolio” of student works. Something that was intended to be a semester long project became (in many cases) a 15-minute activity. The law was repealed ten years after it was implemented.

The above scenario is an example of a mandate (something that legislators and policymakers at the local level may consider to be a good idea) created by well-intentioned people based on a notion that in practice did not yield the hoped-for outcome. It became a monument to their vanity and a wasted policy treated as busy work by staff.

An example of directed micromanagement is illustrated in the well-intended law described in the scenario above. A good idea in one district had caught some legislators’ attention and was crystallized into law. In the process of mandating the good idea legislators undermined its potential, creating one more mandate from the state level that was executed in half-hearted fashion at the local level. A local initiative implemented with flexibility and creativity would have been more likely to be seriously and energetically pursued.

The effective board gives clear, consistent and principle-driven guidance to the superintendent and staff that allow for flexibility in on-the-ground judgment and adjustments. It carefully deliberates on directives before committing them to formal written policy. It understands the role of policy that directs the staff. It directs the superintendent through strategically written policy. The board-superintendent team employs administrative or operational policy as guidance for staff work. If discrepancies are found in policy, the board corrects them, knowing that what matters is not the policy itself but the intended outcomes for which policy is written. Board policy encourages professional development and supports extensive staff professional development to improve student learning.

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Next: Question #36 Does Your Board Delegate to and Support the Superintendent?