Iowa symposium studies school board governance
California State University, Sacramento, College of Education professor Susan Heredia was among 150 researchers, local education officials and administrators, and education association representatives from around the country who were invited to Iowa in September to participate in a symposium on school board governance.
It had been a generation since a similar conference gathered in Des Moines in 1975, a gap that underscores the need for comprehensive study and collaboration among interested parties, said Heredia and others who attended the symposium, “School Board Research: Main Lines of Inquiry.”
“In this time of educational crises, there is a need for true collaboration among board members and superintendents,” said Heredia, a Natomas Unified School District board member and CSBA director-at-large, Hispanic. “At this conference, there was such a momentum and excitement, and people realized the need for this type of conversation, this dialogue, this information.”
Board members and superintendents are at the heart of the governance team that is responsible at the local level for educating the country’s children, but research on their working relationships is relatively rare—and sometimes prejudicial, observed CSBA Senior Director Jo Ann Yee, who also attended the conference.
“There are only a handful of people who do research on school board governance,” said Yee, who oversees strategy development, achievement, diversity and urban affairs efforts at CSBA. Academia produces much of what is published, but other sources can be driven by the agenda of the author or organization generating the report, Yee pointed out.
Yee said the symposium posed the question, “Is what we are doing working?” Participants tackled important issues such as defining what, exactly, school governance is, how it has evolved, how it is currently administered and what the future may hold. Yee said the two days of presentations and discussions went beyond a focus on separate, discrete “pieces” of education data considered in isolation to allow participants to step back for a broader perspective and to “reflect on what it means to be a board member.”
Symposium topics included a historical overview of school board research, relationships between school boards and superintendents, the board’s role in districtwide reform and the improvement of student learning, the board’s organizational and educational influence, and board effectiveness.
Both Yee and Heredia experienced a couple of what Yee termed “aha!” moments of insight during the conference. For Yee, one such epiphany occurred during a panel discussion on school boards’ and superintendents’ authority, when Florida education professor and researcher Meredith Mountford classified board members as being either autocratic (“power on”) or collaborative (“power with”) in their communication strategies with superintendents and others.
Yee recognized that these traits exist, for better or worse, but she emphasized the important roles that stability and unity of purpose play in order for boards and superintendents to become an effective team. The challenge, she said, occurs in “agreeing how to get there.”
Related link: Official background on the symposium, including an extensive overview of issues discussed, can be read @ http://www.ia-sb.org/uploadedFiles/ISBF/Symposium/Symposium%20Overview5(2).pdf
“School Boards at the Dawn of the 21st Century: Conditions and Challenges of District Governance,” A 2002 report prepared for the National School Boards Association by Frederick M. Hess, one of the presenters at the Iowa symposium, is available @ www.nsba.org/bookreports/SBDawn21stCent.pdf.