What’s Wrong with Board Professional Development?

Rick Maloney

This month’s issue of the American School Board Journal includes my article on board PD.

In the article I discuss 6 shortcomings that limit the board’s ability to renew and enhance its governing performance and 5 ways that we can recalibrate our understanding of and approach to board professional development.

Here’s a link to the article:

What’s Wrong with Board Professional Development? (nsba.org)

2 thoughts on “What’s Wrong with Board Professional Development?”

  1. Thanks Rick.
    Good to see that you continue to engage in very practical and useful work to raise the professionalism of School board members from both a boardmanship and governance frame.

    The work is necessary as I have engaged with far too many local boards that are literally operating in totally unprofessional ways. The Board members I have seen operate need a time out room and not PD.

    I would like to see more empowerment of student board members and ways for boards to recognize and change the invisible scourge of racism and white entitlement which local boards hold the line on.

    I hope you get a chance to review my book that I will publish in January called the Fog of Education whwer I devote significant pagea to address the pathologies exhibited by local school boards that I have encountered.

    Take care and congratulations.

    1. Thanks, Bill. I consider the performance of school boards, for each of many skills/knowledge areas, to be at one of four levels (structured somewhat like those of Charlotte Danielson’s or Robert Marzano’s framework of teaching):

    2. INEFFECTIVE – The board does harm to district operations, which in turn diminishes the effectiveness of teaching and ultimately student learning.
    3. BASIC – The board avoids doing harm by working collegially with one another and with the superintendent
    4. PROFICIENT – The board not only avoids doing harm, but proactively leads the district by establishing a good strategic plan, setting good policy, conducting effective superintendent hiring, approving a responsible budget, etc.
    5. DISTINGUISHED – The board not only functions in a proficient manner, but builds institutional structures to ensure that the board functions in a proficient manner in the future. Examples: Creating and nurturing institutional knowledge that does not depend on current members remaining on the board. This ensures the board survives turnover and maintains its high level of functioning in the future.
      In my book A Framework for School Governance I provide this 4-tier framework and fill it in with domains, components, and elements that describe the various knowledge/skills competencies a board must have in order to properly do its governing job. For each domain and component I provide an explanation of the concept, any research that supports it, and a school board story that illustrates the concept, then provide indicators that show the domain or component being done well (or not so well) at one of the four tiers described above. 🙂

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