Are Today's School Boards Obsolete?

PPI Policy Report Calls for Radical Change in District Management

Can a radical change in the role of America's school boards begin to close the stunning achievement gap between poor and minority and middle-class students? In Put Learning First: A Portfolio Approach to Public Schools, a policy report released by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), education analyst Paul Hill argues that re-envisioning the role of schools boards could lead to greater equality and create the more flexible and innovative schools necessary to prepare students for competing in the global economy.

Today, boards oversee a central bureaucracy that owns and operates all the schools in a given district. It is time to retire this "command-and-control" system, Hill argues, and replace it with a new model: portfolio management. In this new system, school boards would manage a diverse array of schools, some run by the school district and others by independent organizations, each designed to meet the different needs of students. Like investors with diversified portfolios of stocks and bonds, school boards would closely manage their community's portfolio of educational service offerings, divesting less productive schools and adding more promising ones.

This is a radical change -- one that public schools systems' flexible structural support systems are designed to resist. Hill argues that the same systems that have given public education stability in the past -- centralized control of funding, collective bargaining, constraints on licensing and site management -- are now diffusing pressure for positive change. In this report, he not only argues for a 21st century school board, he also lays out a roadmap for reformers for overcoming obstacles to change.

"Stability alone is the wrong goal in a complex, fast-changing, modern economy," writes Hill. "Students -- disadvantaged students in particular -- need schools that are focused on providing them with the skills they will need to succeed in today's society, schools that are flexible to try a variety of teaching methods until they succeed in reaching these goals."

What would a public education system look like if it were built for an unending search for better ways of education children? Hill describes the portfolio management system's key attributes as:

• Public oversight: Tight regulation and accountability on civil rights and student performance; loose regulation of procedures;

• Public funding: Schools receive money on a per-pupil basis, with a weighted allotment helping schools provide for disadvantaged children. To provide flexibility with resources at the school and classroom level, districts will need to reduce their services;

• Strategic use of community resources: Combine services with socials service agencies such as state and local mental health care, daycare, or children's services agencies;

• Performance incentives: Parental choice means that successful schools are those that attract families; and

• Free movement of dollars, students, and educators: Schools decide how to make trade-offs between teachers, equipment, and other services. This could mean contracting out the teaching of specialized subjects or renting facilities instead of purchasing them.

"Instead of trying to refurbish an old, ineffective public education structure, [portfolio management] aims to raze the current system to the ground and build a new one," writes Hill. "Certainly, the need for such a system is clear. Encumbered by a system that resists meaningful reform, the nation's schools are unable to educate millions of poor and minority students."

You have read this article with the title Are Today's School Boards Obsolete?. You can bookmark this page URL https://universosportinguista.blogspot.com/2006/12/are-today-school-boards-obsolete.html. Thanks!