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The importance of the first three factors of the Lawler model (knowledge and skills, information, and power) was confirmed in the comparison of actively restructuring and struggling schools. Those schools that were introducing significant change in the teaching and learning process had invested more heavily in the development of both team process skills and instructional staff development. They also had many more approaches to sharing information with multiple constituents. Finally, they had more mechanisms for participation in the governance of the school, and a greater percentage of the faculty were involved.
The area that did not discriminate was the use of rewards, although the actively restructuring schools had found many ways to extend resources, and to provide extra compensation for teachers involved in developing new instructional approaches. Pay for performance was not more prevalent in the restructuring schools.
The lack of extrinsic reward structures in schools is not surprising. Translating the concept of pay for performance to schools is probably the greatest challenge to SBM. Indeed, many would make the case that such an approach is not appropriate for public schools. Skill-based pay schemes in high involvement private sector organizations reward employees for the knowledge and skills they possess. By contrast, the conventional compensation system in education uses indirect, proxy measures of knowledge and skills, namely years of education (level of degree) and years of teaching experience (tenure) (Odden & Conley, 1992). The situation is further complicated by the fact that teacher compensation is negotiated through a union contract, and unions prefer schools and teachers to be treated uniformly throughout the district, which of course flies in the face of differential pay -- the natural consequence of a decentralized reward system. On the horizon, however, are school districts, such as Littleton County, Colorado, that in cooperation with the union are experimenting with differential pay schemes that link teacher pay to teaching skills.
In education, the lack of rewards for performance also may be linked to the issue of measurement. As noted earlier, proxy measures are used to assess teachers' skills, although the work of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards appears promising in this regard. The Board's assessments, which will be different from any current teacher evaluations, will "stress teachers' knowledge of their students and demonstrated ability to work with other teachers to improve local schools" (Wirt & Kirst, 1992, p. 364). Local school districts in the future could use the Board's certification assessments to develop a skills-based pay system.
There also is the problem in education of measuring organizational performance. In spite of national movements to develop educational goals and curriculum standards, there remains scant evidence that districts have bought into these and that the guidelines are driving curriculum and instructional change in classrooms. Consequently, little consensus exists at the school-level over the goals of education and there are few quantifiable measures beyond student test data. The results of this study suggest that empowering schools does not lead to restructured reward systems within schools, and that some schools are able to restructure nevertheless. On the other hand, just as many schools were unable to get school-level actors to focus on performance, despite their new authority.
The question for school districts is whether the kinds of change activities that we saw in the actively restructuring schools can be sustained and broadly diffused in the absence of an incentive structure. In our actively restructuring schools, many teachers and principals worried about burn-out, as many change activities were add-ons to an already full day. It is highly probably that the incentive approaches used in the private sector cannot be translated directly to schools. Nevertheless, the question remains of whether the massive changes implied by school reform can be accomplished without incentives.
This research adds to our understanding of conditions that enable schools to get school-level participants actively involved in introducing improvements to the school. If the intent is to improve school performance, we need to find approaches to SBM that direct the attention of school-level educators with expertise in teaching and learning toward that end, rather than toward management for the sake only of transferring control. We found that the majority of actively restructuring schools did not want to manage the daily operations of the organization beyond what was needed to effect change in teaching and learning. School-based management, therefore, may be a misnomer. Instead, what we probably want are mechanisms that foster high levels of involvement by school-level participants in decisions related to the school's performance and in finding new approaches to improving performance. Relevant decision areas include professional development (knowledge and training for faculty); school budget; and personnel, including how faculties are constituted and compensated as well as technical decisions about how to organize for and deliver teacher services. We also learned from this research the importance of combining SBM with ambitious curriculum and instruction reforms. SBM as a governance reform can act as the enabler or facilitator of school improvement, but without an instructional guidance system, there will be little agreement that improvements in teaching and learning are the goals of SBM. On the other hand, just having such a guidance framework in place and introducing SBM does not insure that schools will focus on changes in instruction.
This study vividly illustrates the importance of school-level factors. The role of the principal is key, and meaningful improvement does not occur when SBM is the playing field for adversarial relations between the principal and staff. The high involvement framework offers a way to conceptualize a new role for the principal, who must facilitate broad involvement by creating and supporting meaningful decision-making influence, the development of new skills and knowledge, information sharing, and rewards (intrinsic, extrinsic, recognition or financial) for making a difference.
Finally, this study has not shown that high involvement in actively restructuring schools leads to performance outcome improvements. Some, but not all, of the restructuring schools felt they had impacted student involvement and other process indicators. Hard test score changes were not reported, and many schools felt that such test scores do not accurately capture the results of their new approaches. This debate will no doubt continue. In the meantime, we rely on qualitative reports that restructuring activities can have and are having an impact. Whether this is true only time will tell. What we can say from this study, however, is that the schools that were introducing changes in instruction and learning as an outcome of their SBM activities were more likely to have higher levels of information sharing, greater knowledge and skill development, and more mechanisms for broad involvement. This provides support for our initial hypothesis, and evidence that districts should take a broader organizational view of SBM.
[School-Based Management: Promise and Process]