Ph. D. Rosenberger - Team Leadership: School Boards at Work

TEAM LEADERSHIP

HOW TO ORDER THIS BOOK

BY PHONE: 800-233-9936 or 717-291-5609, 8AM5PM Eastern Time

BY FAX: 717-295-4538

BY MAIL: Order Department
Technomic Publishing Company, Inc.
851 New Holland Avenue, Box 3535
Lancaster, PA 17604, U.S.A.

BY CREDIT CARD: American Express, VISA, MasterCard

BY WWW SITE: http://www.techpub.com

PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPYPOLICY STATEMENT

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by Technomic Publishing Co., Inc. provided that the base fee of US $3.00 per copy, plus US $ .25 per page is paid directly to Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. For those organizations that have been granted a photocopy license by CCC, a separate system of payment has been arranged. The fee code for users of the Transactional Reporting Service is 1-56676/97 $5.00 + $ .25.

School Boards
at Work

MICHAL K. ROSENBERGER, Ph.D.

Team Leadership

a TECHNOMIC publication

Published in the Western Hemisphere by
Technomic Publishing Company, Inc.
851 New Holland Avenue, Box 3535
Lancaster, Pennsylvania 17604 U.S.A.

Distributed in the Rest of the World by
Technomic Publishing AG
Missionsstrasse 44
CH-4055 Basel, Switzerland

Copyright 1997 by Technomic Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Main entry under title:

Team Leadership: School Boards at Work

A Technomic Publishing Company book
Bibliography:
Includes index

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 96-62020
ISBN 978-1-56676-526-8

To those high-performing leadership teams that overcome the
challenges to provide quality education for all their students,
and to those that are striving to be!

WHEN I tell people that I spend my evenings at meetings of local school boards and that Im writing this book, I receive amused laughter, surprised looks, and expressions of disbelief. Why write a book about school boards? What is so compelling about school boards that I would want to research their role, attempt to define it more clearly, and seek the reasons for their low status in many of our communities?

The short answer is, I believe, that school boards are our (only?) hope for school reform. I believe trustees are well meaning individuals who care about kids. With John Carver and Robert Greenleaf, I believe they can make a difference as servant-leaders when they are provided the tools to govern schools. The longer answer? Well...

For ten years as a teacher and school counselor, I noticed that most schools were not healthy workplaces for anyone. Like a building inspector in a fine-looking building, I first noticed hairline cracks, then structural flaws; I wanted to know what could be done to repair the damages. So, off I went to The University of Texas to study school improvement.

In Austin I studied organizational behavior, educational leadership and politics, consultation skills, adult education, and ethical behavior. Trying to settle on a dissertation topic, I researched School Restructuring, Team Leadership, Group Dynamics, and Developing Efficacy through Training. Then, when I found no correlation between the job description, training, and what school counselors actually do, I was ready to study the complex world of school boards!

All that research became background information when I was hired to write a curriculum for school trustees. Because, like most citizens, I had little knowledge about what members of the local school board need to know and be able to do (the basis for a curriculum), I researched the role. But the more I searched, the more I found it a closed black box.

When engineers draw a diagram of a complicated machine, they use a sort of shorthand. Instead of drawing all the details, they put a box to stand for a whole bunch of parts and label the box with what that bunch of parts is supposed to do. So a black box is a label for what a bunch of things are supposed to do.

Bateson

First I visited with the directors of the many departments in the association. The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) has a large and talented staff, providing resources and technical suport for Texas school trustees in the areas of school law, personnel, training, policy development, risk management, and strategic planning. Each department had a piece of the information I needed. Curiously, though, they didnt seem to share information with each other. I was reminded of the ancient tale of the blind men describing an elephant. One described a tail, another the leg, and so forth. Each believed he had the whole picture, when he had only one part!

Even publications provided little illumination through the fog. I went first to the bulletins and journals provided by the state school board associations. I found that although the material was cloaked in different formats, the content was markedly similar, providing a general view of responsibilities, but few concrete suggestions. Most literature describes overall responsibilities, such as policymaking and goal setting.

Dissertations define some of the challenges of delineating the role, but few describe effective governance. There are, however, countless demographic studies that describe the characteristics of board members. Although knowing ages and ethnicity of trustees was interesting, I couldnt see how it would improve the quality of governance.

I reread books on school improvement and restructuring and was dismayed that boards are usually left out of the information loop. Few research-oriented journals feature articles regarding school board issues, effective governance, or the interdependence of good governance and systemic school reform. The few books and journals on school governance led me back to other publications regarding team leadership, corporate governing bodies, and the political milieu of education.

I went to workshops and conferences with novice trustees, seeking practical information on educational governance. We found their role poorly defined, even misrepresented. The training was so shallow that I had the impression that anyone could quickly become an effective trustee. The complexities of school politics, the leadership functions of the local board, and their role in school improvement are seldom discussed. The role was described in a passive way. Workships, seminars, and conferences provided disconnected pieces but no overall structure. Nowhere was the research on the complexities and paradoxes of groups or strategies for effective team leadership discussed.

When I asked superintendents to share materials and anecdotes about their boards, they sent me sample agendas and board packets. The items on the agendas had little connection to the content of the training I had attended: Review and Approval of Checks, Bids on Food Services, Products, and Supplies, Carpet Replacement, Proposed Ground Lease for Radio Tower, Bowie High School. The chasm between the stated role and responsibilities and how boards spend their meeting time was amazing!

Eventually I stumbled over Carvers