Bridge the great divide between distanced administrative duties and daily classroom impact. This book introduces a top-down power mechanism called defined autonomy, a concept that focuses on district-defined, nonnegotiable, common goals and a system of accountability supported by assessment tools. Defined autonomy creates an effective balance of centralized direction and individualized empowerment that allows building-level staff the stylistic freedom to respond quickly and effectively to student failure.
In 1987, Jacqueline Danzberger described school boards as the forgotten players. However, things have changed drastically for school boards over the past few years. No longer are school boards the forgotten players in school governance. Instead, school boards often find themselves in the center of controversies stemming from the intrusion of political partisanship into local governance structures which historically, and for the purposes of sustained democratic educational governance, were intentionally intended to be non-partisan elected boards. However, this is where many school boards find themselves today. The chapters in this volume address several key questions school board members are currently facing as they struggle to protect some of our country’s earliest guardrails of democracy; local control of schools. To be sure, school boards are no longer the forgotten players. Implications of this may be wide reaching and therefore deserve room in the current literature on educational governance. Volume II of the Research on the Superintendency series highlights recent research on school boards, local control, governance, and the superintendency. Each chapter is briefly described and the chapters are in a particular order that readers may wish to pay attention to as they enjoy the book. The first three chapters deal with local control in both rural and urban settings. The next two chapters are studies focused mainly on school boards and how their roles have shifted over the years followed by a chapter on the relationship between school boards and their superintendents within a regulatory environment and the level of stress it can bring to board members and superintendents. The final five chapters describe recent superintendent research that is closely linked to school governance or school board policies. We ask readers to juxtapose lessons learned in those five chapters to the role of school boards within the context of those chapters.
The Journal of School Leadership is broadening the conversation about schools and leadership and is currently accepting manuscripts. We welcome manuscripts based on cutting-edge research from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations. The editorial team is particularly interested in working with international authors, authors from traditionally marginalized populations, and in work that is relevant to practitioners around the world. Growing numbers of educators and professors look to the six bimonthly issues to: deal with problems directly related to contemporary school leadership practice teach courses on school leadership and policy use as a quality reference in writing articles about school leadership and improvement.
The Journal of School Leadership is broadening the conversation about schools and leadership and is currently accepting manuscripts. We welcome manuscripts based on cutting-edge research from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives and methodological orientations. The editorial team is particularly interested in working with international authors, authors from traditionally marginalized populations, and in work that is relevant to practitioners around the world. Growing numbers of educators and professors look to the six bimonthly issues to: deal with problems directly related to contemporary school leadership practice teach courses on school leadership and policy use as a quality reference in writing articles about school leadership and improvement.
This position statement, coauthored by a joint committee composed of members of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and the National School Boards Association (ASBA), outlines a new cooperative relationship for superintendents and school boards. In light of the challenges that today's superintendents and school boards face, it is necessary that both parties examine their roles and responsibilities. This document describes the work of the joint committee, professional standards for the superintendency, and the governance role of school boards. It also highlights some societal changes that have affected public school governance and administration. Three major factors of the board-superintendent relationship include the nature of policy development and administration; the increasing influence of external factors on local district governance; and the discretionary authority granted to boards by their chief administrators. The specific responsibilities for boards and superintendents are outlined. Effective communication is identified as a key to a successful board-administrator relationship. (LMI)
