6 Dec 2007, Sam Stringfield
[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.]
The question, “Can school boards make a difference in students’ academic accomplishments?” is addressed through a combination of a case study and review of research on school board effects. The case study is the New Board of School Commissioners of Baltimore City Maryland. From the Spring of 1999 through June of 2005 I had the privilege of serving on the New Board of School Commissioners of the Baltimore City (Maryland) Public School System (BCPSS). The review of research on school board effects was conducted by a colleague and myself (Land, 2002; Land & Stringfield, 2005) because I found the experience of being on an urban school board confusing, and I wanted help in making sense of it. Alone (Stringfield, in press) and with a colleague (Stringfield & Yakimowski, 2005), I’ve written “scholarly” pieces on the effects of the work of that board on students’ rates of academic success. Here I want to describe what it was like to be on the board of a large, historically troubled school system’s board. I do not claim that my experiences would generalize to all of the people who serve, typically for no pay, on the 15,000+ local school boards. I do hope my observations can be useful to a few of those good folks, and maybe to a university- or foundation-based person or two, too.
Twelve themes of my experience are as follows:
1. School Boards can help improve the academic experiences of students.
2. Boards must have clear goals.
3. Getting accurate data and information are key.
4. Working across organizational levels is essential.
5. The work—especially the homework—required to make a positive impact is large, and mostly tedious.
6. Teamwork is key.
7. The environment in which school boards (and school systems) work is inherently political, not in an “evil” sense, but in the sense of diverse, often legitimate power vectors that must be addressed. If/where/when school boards didn’t exist, politicians would create them.
8. Awareness of research can help, although research on school board effectiveness is strikingly thin, and the quality of research often leaves much to be desired. Further, the guidance that can be provided by scholarly research is typically long-term, and often not of use in the midst of any given fray.
9. Prior experience in the relatively high end public or private management may help.
10. The three largest levers board members hold are the superintendent’s contract, the budget, and access to media.
11. A school board member’s largest assets are formal and informal communications. The latter is also their Achilles heel.
12. An appreciation of the long haul, humor, and humility help.
Before delving into the data from which these ten conclusions are reached, two sets of background data are summarized. The first is a brief post-World War II history of Baltimore and the Baltimore City Public Schools. The second is an even more brief description of my background, which I will note only because it had unusual components for a new school board member.