OSBA Bridges to Achievement Project

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Project Description

Introduction and Rationale

Oregon has 198 school districts, 20 regional educational service districts, and 17 community colleges. All have elected boards totaling approximately 1400 board members. The majority of Oregon's 198 school districts are small with 104 school districts having fewer than 1,000 students and an additional 71 school districts having 1,000-7,000 students. With school budgets tight, professional development and leadership training, especially for the board, often suffers. In districts maintaining an active professional development program for the board and staff, activities are rarely aligned with any organized plan or district-wide improvement effort.

As the organization for K-12 school districts, Education Service Districts (ESD’s) and Community Colleges boards, the Oregon School Boards Association (OSBA) is coordinating this project in fulfillment of an OSBA board goal to assist members with improvement of student achievement in Oregon.

Whatever controversies the accountability movement has generated, a decade of standards-based reform has created a consensus on at least one point: student achievement is the ultimate measure in today’s education climate. Teachers, administrators and policy makers now routinely preface their action plans with the reminder that success is defined in terms of student goals and achievement gains. For school boards this presents some challenging questions. In the current environment, standards are set at the state level and translated into instruction at the school level leaving an ill-defined role for the school district in between the two. Historically, school boards have taken a low-key, hands-off approach to student learning, reasoning that instructional decisions should be made by professional educators. Now school boards are being asked to give greater attention to the impact of their governance decisions on student achievement without any new tools or models to follow. Additionally, school reform models to date have essentially ignored the leadership role of the school board in creating the type of district-wide environment that fosters success.

Meeting the demand for standard-based and result-oriented school improvement has focused on the prevalent thinking about school practices rather than considering fundamental systemic change. In doing so school reform planning guides adhere to the failed assumption that intensifying and narrowing the focus of behavioral discipline are sufficient to the task of continuously raising test scores. This assumption ignores the need for fundamentally restructuring school and community resources in ways that enable learning. When Adelman and Taylor (2005) asked what’s missing in school improvement planning, they noted that planning and implementation of a school’s approach to addressing learning and teaching barriers usually are conducted on a ad hoc basis. Also, the support staff tend to function in relative isolation of each other and stakeholders. Unfortunately, the tendency among reformers has been to focus mainly on the symptom of fragmentation. The main prescription has been to enhance coordination, but it does not really address the problem that school-owned student supports are marginalized in policy and practice. With respect to changing the deficiency in school reform models, Adelman and Taylor (2005) conclude that “addressing barriers to learning and teaching must be an essential and high level focus in every school improvement planning guide.” “The intent must be to develop a comprehensive, multifaceted and cohesive approach. This, of course, represents major systemic change and requires shifts in prevailing policy and new frameworks for practice and sufficient resources to develop an effective structural foundation and ongoing capacity building for such change.” Creating a climate for the required change must include the role of the school board which adopts the policies and allocates the resources within the school district.

Although the current accountability movement has NOT prescribed a robust role for local districts, Elmore (1993) indicates local school boards can provide checks and balances to the state and federal actions, adapt state reforms to local conditions, mobilize local support, and serve as a source of creativity and innovation. However, Elmore (1993) found that districts did not typically coordinate policies to influence what happened in the classroom; their efforts were scattered, piecemeal and, for the most part, weak in influencing teaching and leadership within the system. Nonetheless, he was able to cite studies suggesting that active district involvement could stimulate reform activity at the school level.

When McCarthy and Celio (2001) interviewed educators in Washington schools that had failed to make progress on state standards, they found that district-level passivity was a common theme. Principals and teachers felt “little performance pressure” and school boards seemed disengaged. We know a fair amount about capacity building at the school level (Marzano, Waters, and McNulty, 2005). We know, for example, that creating professional development learning communities within schools makes a difference in student learning. In addition, when we do find capacity building at the school level, we can not claim that it is caused by the school, district or the state (Fullan, 2005)

For these reasons, school districts over the past decade have become more engaged in district-wide improvement efforts. This has, in a few cases, resulted in increases in student achievement. However, this improvement is generally not very deep and it has not resulted in systemic K-12 change. Again, we can not claim this is caused by the system, community activities or state policies. Highly effective school districts remain in the minority across the country and do not typically last beyond the tenure of a couple of superintendents and/or school board teams (Fullan, Bertani, and Quinn, 2004).

Little is known about the impact of good governance and effective leadership practices at the board level on student achievement. Even less is known about the relationship of ESD services and community college programs to K-12 student achievement and the engagement of the community. What has been missing from the reform effort to date has been an examination of the impact of effective leadership from the school board and its migration through the system, both internally and externally, to create a supportive education environment at all levels for students. The importance of this project is two-fold:

Help boards understand their role in the improvement of student achievement;
Provide boards the leadership skills and tools to create an environment for success throughout the district.

Proceed to the next section: Hypothesis

OSBA Bridges to Achievement Project

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