A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Section IV - Beyond the Schoolhouse: What Districts Can Do To Support School-Based Reform

This section shares lessons on what district central staff can do to support school-based reform. The section describes how districts can effectively provide professional development opportunities, offer schools sufficient authority and flexibility, build and manage community support, and garner needed resources.

Providing Professional Development Opportunities

Regardless of the district's overall approach to supporting reform, the central office can be one important provider, convener, or facilitator of the professional development opportunities teachers need to meet the challenges of school improvement. The district can play various roles in providing professional development support; it need not be the only trainer or the one that defines what is to be done. Some alternative patterns of professional development are summarized and illustrated below, arranged in rough order from the greatest to the least control by the district over the staff development offered.

• The professional development center. One district exemplified this approach to professional development assistance by creating a "professional development academy" with the aid of outside foundation funding.

• Expert trainer. A less ambitious variation on the theme of the professional development center occurred in instances where the district staff development director or others at the central office possessed expertise in areas related to the school-based reform effort.

• Definer of a menu of professional development options. The district might not possess the expertise required to provide staff development directly, but instead might define a series of acceptable options for staff development, as found in several cases in the study.

• Professional development broker. Rather than set out a menu of possibilities, the district could act as an intermediary between schools and outside experts or other sources, such as professional societies or universities.

• Source of professional development resources. The district is also one source of funds to support staff development activities devised by the school, and it may simply provide the wherewithal for school people to arrange for their own professional development.

Whatever their role in staff development, districts are most effective when their efforts enable school people to acquire skills, knowledge, and ideas that are appropriate to the school-based reforms in which they are engaged. The lack of fit between district-provided in-service training and what school people want has often been documented, and the potential for such an outcome is clearly present as the district becomes more heavily involved in staff development of various kinds.

Other forms of technical assistance (e.g., with grant writing, troubleshooting, materials, and technology) are also important, but arguably less central than direct professional development of teaching staffs. Such technical assistance can involve fairly mundane operational details of reform--e.g., determining whether waivers are required for a change in the school day schedule and helping the school process the waiver request. On the other hand, school people often need help addressing more fundamental matters, such as determining the most appropriate mode of assessing major changes in practice. Where it possesses the expertise--or knows how to get access to it--the district can be very helpful with these kinds of challenges.

Setting and Waiving Requirements

Finding the appropriate balance between district and school control is a difficult and evolving process. The study identified two general guidelines for policy makers to consider in deciding when top-down policies are called for. First, it is important to tie requirements clearly and directly to learning goals. Examples include districts that specify the content that students need to be exposed to or to describe the competencies students should possess in each subject area, instead of specifying the number of minutes of instruction that students must receive in a certain content area each and every day.

Second, it is important that district requirements or mandates respect the variability that exists across schools. The study found that many schools had to struggle with district mandates that specified the exact makeup of a school council. A better policy might be to require that schools have a formal method of including teachers, staff, and community members in key decisions and then give schools flexibility on how to do so.

Staff in many of the schools visited in the study felt that they profited from being freed from normal school scheduling regulations, cumbersome rules about the use of school specialists, or requirements to use only district-approved textbook series. In other sites, especially in those where the vision or reform originated at the district level, requirements worked to catalyze improvement efforts by requiring detailed long-range improvement plans, a new curricular emphasis, or an expanded and more helpful form of instructional supervision.

The loosening of regulations--especially through the use of waivers on a case-by-case basis--does not ensure that the district provides a flexible environment for school-based reform, however. The process of considering and granting waivers can be cumbersome and, from the schools' point of view, is often a mixed blessing. In one large urban district in the study, district respondents reported spending inordinate amounts of energy researching and processing waiver requests from school staff in a network of state-funded schools engaged in school improvement. In many instances, it was not easy to determine exactly what requirements applied and where they originated. As often as not, there was no formal requirement that pertained to a particular situation, only the perception by mid-level managers in the central office that something was required.

Managing Forces and Conditions outside the School's Control

Managing external forces and conditions includes a variety of roles: buffering school people from the outside world; interpreting and adapting the demands of the outside to make them less burdensome for the schools; and cultivating outside groups for the advantage of schools. Below are discussed issues related to the dynamics of working with the teachers' union, community, and state government.

Engaging the Teachers' Union--Especially in larger districts, teachers' unions play a vital role in school reform. In some sites, teachers' unions are at the forefront of reform efforts by encouraging teacher leadership and professionalism. In other sites, unions work with district administrators to advance the reform agenda. In some cases, however, the union is seen by schools as representing a series of constraints, chiefly in the areas of hiring, extra duties and assignments, and other matters pertaining to working conditions in the schools. In particular, the seniority-based hiring systems in many districts' contracts reportedly made it extremely difficult for schools to recruit the kinds of teachers who are sympathetic to a particular reform effort.

Because the union represents teachers on a districtwide basis, individual schools are inherently at a disadvantage in eliciting union support or cooperation for a particular reform effort, unless school people happen to have close personal ties to the union (as was the case in several schools visited during the study). Because of this disadvantage, the district central office can play a pivotal role.

Successful mediation in this role requires that districts and unions progress beyond an adversarial labor vs. management model of collective bargaining to one emphasizing collective professional responsibility for educational improvement. For example, some districts in the study renegotiated contracts to give schools more flexibility regarding aspects of the union contract while affording teachers more involvement in school-based decisions. In this way, flexibility is exchanged for authority, and administrators and teachers become clearer partners in improving schools.

District leadership can be proactive in engaging union leaders in the substance and philosophy of a given reform effort. This process was most clearly illustrated in South Mission Unified School District, in which the superintendent took the union leader, along with district administrators, board members, and school administrators, to four-day workshops on the Effective Schools process. His intention in doing so was to expose the union head to the philosophy that he hoped would guide all reform efforts in the district.

Overall, school-based reform poses a dilemma for active teacher unions and for district and school administrators. The emphasis of reforms on increased teacher professionalism and greater teacher authority at the school level fulfills long-held goals of the unions while threatening the traditional authority of administrators. Concurrently, the move toward greater school-based authority and autonomy threatens traditional union support for uniform work rules and hiring criteria while giving administrators new flexibility. In the end, the success of school reform requires that districts and unions find an amicable middle ground that protects their interests while promoting the reform agenda.

Cultivating the Community--Like teacher unions, communities can be both allies and opponents of school-based reform efforts. Unlike unions, communities are rarely well organized or able to articulate collective and concrete visions of what schools should look like. The national study found many instances in which the community exerted a general pressure for better test scores, lower dropout rates, or more attention to this or that group, but it was unusual for a community to be a major motivating force directing schools to adopt schoolwide comprehensive reform efforts of the sort that are the focus of this guide.

Districts (and schools) often have to "sell" or explain the idea of the reform approach to the community. Current reforms, especially in the areas of curriculum and instruction, represent a stark departure from the experiences of most adults in the community. Block scheduling and field-based learning experiences are new concepts for most parents. Teacher and parent decision-making teams require a new kind of participation on the part of adults. The use of more integrated approaches to compensatory and special education programs often seems like a threat to parents who have fought hard to establish special services for low-achieving or special-need students.

Therefore, district staff should undertake active campaigns to enlist the support of key constituencies within the community. The study found that one effective strategy (at both the district and school levels) to deal with communities' concerns is to bring the community and the school together as much as possible. Thus, parents in one rural district came to support a new hands-on curriculum as the district made arrangements for students to visit local farms and small factories to learn directly from local residents.

Interpreting State Requirements and Mandates-- Forces at the state level--especially those emanating from the state education agency, the governor's office, the legislature, state professional associations, or combinations of these groups are an ever-present feature of the reform landscape in most districts. Inescapably, the district acts as intermediary by either ignoring or interpreting reform ideas, resources, and requirements from the state level. Key roles the district can play here include:

• translating and making sense of the array of state requirements for schools so that school staff are not required to read and understand for themselves each proclamation from the state capitol

• communicating the concerns of school staff regarding state requirements to the appropriate state-level audiences

• brokering state waivers and exceptions, thereby providing schools with a critical form of support for the reform efforts in question

The degree to which and the way in which districts can manage state forces impinging on school reform efforts depend a great deal on the political culture of the state and the tradition establishing the degree to which the districts must pay heed to the state. For example, the Kentucky state reform bill mandates deep restructuring of educational programs in all schools. This situation contrasts sharply with those in other states that provide for more local control over educational matters, such as Washington's Schools for the 21st Century, a 5-year demonstration program offering $250,000 and greater flexibility under state requirements to a selected group of 30 schools and school districts across the state.

Garnering Resources

The district can play various roles in this regard. The study encountered districts contributing resources to school-based reform efforts in a variety of ways, among them:

• creating special programs targeted to schoolwide improvement efforts of various kinds

• helping schools secure external grant funding from the state, foundations, or private-sector firms

• reallocating resources in the overall district budget to provide greater assistance to school-level reform efforts

• transferring budgetary authority to schools to make it easier for them to concentrate resources on key reform goals

Summary

There is clearly no one "best" role for districts to play. Rather, the optimum form of district support depends on the fit between district-and school-level visions of reform and on the resolution of the inevitable authority issues that are involved. On balance, the odds of sustaining promising school-based reforms over the long term are probably better in districts that assume an active role in support of these reforms, creating a clear vision of change and providing needed resources.

But if there is no "best" way to support reform at the school level, there clearly are ways for districts to stand in its way, even when they intend to help. District policies, actions, and conditions can seriously impede school-level initiatives. In particular, overly strict interpretation of state and federal compliance requirements, insistence on uniformity across schools, unwillingness to grant schools greater decision-making authority, and inflexibility about district procedural requirements are among the ways that central office officials thwart the designs of school-level reformers.

The findings from the national study suggest a number of concrete steps that districts can take to support reform.

1. The district can serve as the initial stimulus for school-based reform. Although this may seem inconsistent with the concept of school-based reform, many--perhaps a majority of--schools that are receptive or susceptible to reform do not spontaneously imagine new and better missions, organizations, curricula, and approaches to instruction. Something must catalyze the reform process, and in many cases the initial catalyst came from the district level.

2. The district can assemble a critical mass of resources (including funds, knowledge, materials, and specialized forms of assistance) that school-based reformers need and are hard pressed to come up with by themselves. School-based reform is hard, labor-intensive work, and the study found that school people engaged in this process appreciated the resources that often came their way from the central office. Moreover, professional development sponsored by the central office is often a source of key reform ideas, even leadership, for the schools.

3. The district offers a broader professional forum for reform ideas, in which the staff of one school might interact on an intense and regular basis with other school staffs in developing their thinking.

However, the analyses suggest that, to play a consequential role, the district often needs to change the way it does business. In this sense, the ultimate conclusion is that the district is important to the success of school-based reform in proportion to its willingness to reform itself. Otherwise, wittingly or unwittingly, it may indeed undermine what school-level people do to improve schooling.
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