Editor's note: ‘Defining leadership for today’s school board member’
By:
Brian Taylor
Winter 2012
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” —New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, 1985
Governance, that plain, prosaic sibling of political campaigning’s poetry—or, sometimes, doggerel—is the subject of every page of this issue of California Schools, from CSBA Executive Director Vernon M. Billy’s report on page 5 right through the legislative report card, prepared by our Governmental Relations Department. Even the ads speak to an important governance role of school boards: responsibly and efficiently managing the public purse to get the biggest bang for the buck, to put it prosaically.
The theme comes up early on in “A Conversation with … Cindy Marks,” CSBA’s president-elect.
“When I was elected to the school board in Modesto 15 years ago, the focus was almost exclusively on governance leadership,” Marks told Executive Editor Laurie Weidner. Board agendas are crowded with other issues—student achievement, conditions of children and funding and finance (the other topics that join governance among the themes we now rotate through in Calfiornia Schools’ four quarterly issues), but Marks identified another underlying aspect of governance and tied it to an attribute of leadership: advocacy.
“In defining leadership for today’s school board member,” Marks said, “I would expand the definition to include the critical role we have as public advocates for education in our communities. … We need to support the grassroots advocacy effort that is being advanced by CSBA, with each of us doing our part. As school board members, we need to be that unified voice that comes together to talk with our local and state officials. Who better to speak to them about the impact of the legislation on schools than us?”
There’s nobody better, agrees CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Governmental Relations Dennis Meyers. In “Did Your Legislator Make the Grade?” he explains how his department helps school board members to be that unified voice. Meyers and his staff are in daily contact with lawmakers and other state officials, seeking to educate them on the impact their plans would have on schools and to persuade them how best to proceed. It’s hard work, but it gets a little easier every time a local board member phones or writes to deliver the message personally.
“Getting a call from a school board member on a pending bill means a lot to legislators and staff,” Meyers says. “Getting several calls from several school board members has an exponential affect.”
Governance also gets its due elsewhere in this magazine:
Staff writer Kristi Garrett takes the board’s role down to brass tacks in examining the evolution and intent—as well as unintended consequences—of school discipline policies in “Out of Sight, Out of Mind? Schools Are Questioning Use of Suspensions and Expulsions." (That’s also Garrett’s evocative photograph on her feature and the cover.)
CSBA Assistant Executive Director for Member Services Martin Gonzalez gives an overview of the association’s governance training opportunities and its Professional Governance Standards, which have been adopted by more than 400 district and county office boards. His CSBA at Issue column is paired with one by Policy and Programs Officer Christopher Maricle, who imagines the future in a generation raised on the Common Core State Standards that, he says, “may change governance itself.”
Maricle also passes on more of the commonsense governance advice that his BoardWise advice column has become known for.
The role of governance is even explored in this issue’s Class Acts, where Pleasant Valley School District board member (and CSBA Region 11 Director) Suzanne Kitchens tells staff writer Carol Brydolf that a Golden Bell Award-winning program supporting the children of military families “was a natural outcome” of her district’s governance.
“Student learning is at the heart of every decision our school board makes,” Kitchens said.
I couldn’t say it any more poetically, so I’ll just add this: Thanks for reading!
Brian Taylor (btaylor@csba.org) is the managing editor of California Schools.