Education, insights for governance teams at AEC
Published: January 3, 2012
More than 4,000 K-12 public school leaders and supporters filled the San Diego Convention Center for CSBA’s Annual Education Conference and Trade Show last month to learn and share insights on effective strategies to advance student achievement and effective school governance in the face of historic challenges.
The Annual Conference is unsurpassed in its focus on continuing education for school board members, with more than 150 workshops and special sessions packed with information trustees need to effectively govern their school districts and county offices of education. Out on the trade show floor, some 200 exhibitors explained how their products and services can help cash-strapped educational agencies better serve their students and staff.
Perhaps most important, more than 2,000 school board members and superintendents met with and learned from each other and the nearly 250 scheduled speakers—including nationally renowned General Session keynoters whose presentations were carried live over the Internet to several hundred more viewers who couldn’t attend in person.
2011 CSBA President Martha Fluor addressed some of her remarks at the first General Session to the nearly 250 new school board members who registered for the conference.
“This conference will establish a valuable foundation for your school board career, as well as inform the important work of colleagues who share the same vision and the same challenges,” Fluor said.
What follows is just a sampling of AEC sessions large and small, which were woven around seven interrelated themes: emerging trends in education; evaluation and professional development; finance and facilities; leadership through governance; public relations, community outreach and advocacy; student achievement; and the whole child.
Teaching excellence
With teachers at the heart of education, several AEC sessions were devoted to their ongoing professional development. The Sonoma Leadership Network is just one example of many effective programs that were showcased. Essentially a professional learning community uniting teachers and administrators, the Network currently has 287 participants from 68 schools in 23 participating school districts spread over four Northern California counties. In its eighth year of operation, it still has 90 percent of the original districts involved.
“Schools can’t work in isolation … districts can’t work in isolation,” said session moderator Cynthia Pilar, who helped establish the program as a staff member of the Sonoma County Office of Education. “Random acts of professional development” and “pockets of excellence” may occur, but “you will rarely see systemwide reform or systemwide implementation.”
Cloverdale Unified School District board President Dianna MacDonald attributed part of the Network’s success to lessons from CSBA’s Masters in Governance program, which teaches that the board’s role is to:
- Set direction
- Establish structure
- Provide support
- Ensure accountability
- Act as community leaders
“This model really makes a difference,” MacDonald said. In providing support, for example, she said the most important things a school board can do are to build time for teacher collaboration into the school day and to fund professional development in the budget.
Even in the most effective programs, though, not every teacher will develop the skills needed to reach every student, as another session presented by representatives of Poway School District and Campbell Union School District pointed out.
Poway SD Superintendent John Collins discussed the strong peer review program his district has developed over the past 25 years to help teachers hone their skills. A governance board composed of district and union representatives ensures that their teacher evaluation systems are supporting high-quality teaching and measuring the results in student performance. Collins said the collaborative approach pays off, with even tenured teachers who are deemed unsatisfactory agreeing to resign after having been given adequate retraining opportunities.
Charter ‘perils and promise’
Recent reports have documented the continuing growth of charter schools. While 93 percent of California’s students remain in traditional public schools, the state’s nearly 1,000 charter schools now serve some 412,000 students—a 13 percent rise in the past year. Charters remain a controversial element of public education, with hotly disputed claims about their effectiveness, the diversity of the students they serve, their governance and other issues.
Edward Sklar and Devon Lincoln, attorneys who specialize in charter school law, explored some facets of the complicated issue in their workshop, “The Perils and Promise of Dependent Charter Schools.” Lincoln summarized some reasons districts may want to establish charters, from the relative regulatory freedom they enjoy and the innovative approaches to education they can offer, to funding opportunities and technological advances and now near-ubiquitous access to the Internet that allows more online instruction, often blended with in-class lessons.
But they also urged caution.
“Who runs the show at a dependent charter school?” Sklar asked. It used to be the district governing board, he said, but federal regulators’ interest in charter autonomy has led to growing independence. “We’re seeing more authority being granted to dependent charters,” he said, and some opt to become independent—saddling districts with ongoing expenses and legal liability while further limiting the district board’s control. Other considerations: Charter employees may also have a different relationship to other district employees’ bargaining units; the schools may impinge on district facilities; and their ability to enroll students from beyond district boundaries can incur special-education costs the district would not otherwise bear.
“Expect the unexpected,” Lincoln advised.
Haugen Memorial Lecture
Annual Conference themes extend beyond the mechanics of education and governance to broader issues affecting children and society. The Juanita Haugen Memorial Lecture on Civic Education, named for the 1997 CSBA president who devoted much of her life to promoting students’ civic engagement, has been an annual feature since 2007. For the 2011 lecture, Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder focused on Fred Korematsu, an American of Japanese ancestry who opposed the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II; the U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled the practice had been unconstitutional. Chander and Sunder dramatized the story in a comic book that sold out at AEC’s CSBA Store.
The store is just one more facet of AEC’s array of offerings, from preconference events for both new and experienced school board members to the Golden Bell Award Luncheon that concludes the marathon of scheduled events. More than 450 people attended this year’s presentation, which honored more than four dozen exemplary local programs.
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