3 Dec 2007, Mary Delagardelle
[This is an abstract of a paper given at the symposium School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry, in Des Moines, Iowa, September 14-15, 2007. The full paper is published in Relevancy and Revelation: The Future of School Board Governance, by Rowman and Littlefield, Spring 2008.]
“Quality school board functioning is central to the effectiveness of schooling. In fact, the effectiveness of school board governance is the single most important determinant of school district success or failure.”
-- The Honorable Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education (2002)
These were the opening remarks of the second annual Jacqueline P. Danzberger Memorial Lecture during the National School Boards Association annual conference. However, school boards have not typically sought or been encouraged to play an active role in most facets of instructional reform efforts leading to improved student achievement. Generally, boards and superintendents have been more comfortable leaving instructionally related matters solely in the hands of the professional staff.
With the increasing public demand for accountability, a new emphasis on the responsibility of the board, as a governing body, to create the vision and direction for student learning, to set policy, to provide resources for improvement efforts, and then to monitor the results of student achievement initiatives (Henderson et al., 2001a, 2001b) is gaining public attention. School boards are charged with decisions that impact what students learn, how students are taught, how learning is measured, how teachers are supported with professional development, how funds are focused on district priorities, and how effectively the community is engaged around student learning. While, by their nature school boards are removed from the day-to-day work of teaching and learning, they control the conditions that can allow successful teaching and learning to occur throughout the system.
The public cry for improved achievement and accountability in public schools and the traditional lack of board involvement in issues related to student achievement create an urgent need to clearly understand the leadership role of the board as it relates to improving student learning. A better understanding of how board members establish district priorities, how district priorities are influenced by the attitudes and beliefs of the board members, and what board actions will most likely result in shared commitment to district priorities related to student learning is a critical need in the educational literature (Coleman & LaRocque, 1990; Delagardelle, 2006).
In order to elucidate the role of the school board and examine the possible influence of school boards on school system performance, this multi-phase line of inquiry examined the leadership differences in high and low achieving districts, the beliefs and actions of board/superintendent teams, board members’ perceptions about their roles and responsibilities for improving student learning, the influence of certain contextual factors and characteristics of board members upon those beliefs, and the relationship between the beliefs and actions of the school board and the capacity of the school district to positively impact student learning. The findings after nine years of study begin to shed light on the governance roles and responsibilities that may be necessary to positively impact student learning in schools and school districts.