ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, November 4, 1996 TAG: 9611040108
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
AFTER THREE years, school-based management hasn't moved the meter on fourth-graders' standardized test scores, a University of Virginia survey of 35 schools shows. So, time to chuck the concept?
That would be premature.
Three years is not a lot of time between introducing a structural change in the way schools operate and looking for giant strides in student performance. Site-based management promises incremental change that, over time, is expected to improve learning. Anyone anticipating a great leap forward - or quick, dramatic movement in any direction - will be disappointed.
Particularly when, as in Roanoke and Roanoke County schools, the idea of school-based management has been diluted, or at least is starting out small. Rather than giving each school's principal, teachers and parents control of curriculum, personnel and budget, both divisions maintain central authority over these core areas.
Committees that include teachers, parents and community leaders act as advisory boards to school principals in the county. But they don't make the decisions on budgets and personnel. And the city's site-based councils make decisions about such things as after-school programs, technology and fund-raising. Neither program is exactly revolutionary, and a lot of items that might affect test scores aren't (yet anyway) on the table.
Indeed, while the UVa study uses fourth-grade test scores as the means of measuring success, the councils themselves do not. There is no common goal among councils that would guide them to concentrate their initial efforts on improving standardized test results. So far in their young lives, a city school official says, they have tended to concentrate on more immediate concerns: sorely needed building repairs, student discipline. Some city schools have made progress in lowering alarming truancy rates.
Notably, they have done so with a measure of flexibility, but aiming for outcomes requested and gauged by the central administration. The flip side of empowering schools to do their thing must be shared accountability and alignment on goals.
Which in turn suggests that the benefits of school-based management could grow as alignment increases on other education reforms: smaller classes, year-round schooling, greater encouragement of creativity, raised expectations and standards for both students and teachers, more public-school choice, charter-school experiments, greater authority to remove mediocre teachers, a common core curriculum, and so forth. Local control may be more significant, in other words, when it has more meaningful improvements to implement.
Everyone needs to understand that the journey to decentralized decision-making is neither quick nor easy; empowerment and alignment have to grow in tandem. Yet surely, as Roanoke County Superintendent Deanna Gordon suggests: "It seems logical to involve people in decisions who will be affected by those decisions."
In the long run, of course, school-based management's objective has to be greater learning and student achievement, and to the extent that school councils are given authority to make decisions, they will have to accept responsibility for the results. It's early, though, to be handing out grades.
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