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Lesson 5: Decision Making Part II
5.2. Site-Based Management
Site-based management (SBM) is also referred to as school-based management. Like leadership and decision-making, it has multiple models. Generally speaking, it is a way to shift the organizational structure of the individual school within a district from a centralized to a decentralized system, and to thereby grant greater responsibility and control for decision making to principals, teachers, parents, and students. Examples of this control, with primary emphases on teaching and learning goals and outcomes, may include professional development, staffing, instructional decisions, budgeting, instructional materials, and scheduling. Site-based management involves creating a representative, collaborative, decision-making council at the school.[1]
The collective literature on SBM establishes a distribution of roles and responsibilities to aid schools with implementation. General responsibilities are articulated for school councils, teachers, the collective bargaining unit (union leadership), principals, parents, central office, and the school board. Although the shift in decision making and responsibility is closest to those who work directly with students—the school—the entire system has an important role to play. Everyone needs to be trained in their new roles within the framework of a decentralized school governance structure.
Characteristics of successful SBM schools include the need for strong and consistent leadership, a culture that supports the effort and focuses on improving student learning outcomes, time to make all the pieces come together, alignment within and across the system, professional development on what SBM is in a given district, and the necessary skills to support the changing roles and responsibilities. And skill in a different kind of collaboration and decision making than is the norm in a centralized, more top-down organizational structure.
There is an abundance of research and literature about site-based management and its promising results in the effort to improve public schools. And your textbook offers excellent information to guide administrators and teachers in the who, what and why of decision-making that empowers teachers. Review carefully the key assumptions and principles at the end of the assigned reading. But before the chapter, literally and figuratively, is closed on information about site-based management, read this personal observation.
- Lesson 2 included an anecdote and a quote from South Africa's Mr. Clive Roos: "Structure without capacity is only ornamentation and distorts the system." I would add that capacity without structure is also ornamentation and distorts the system. No matter how many pieces of the whole are effectively implemented in a SBM change effort, it takes both to make it work.
- Mr. Roos also discussed his belief that educational provisions and initiatives are almost always fitted around political solutions and compromise. I didn't understand the relevance of this statement as clearly as I do now after watching the havoc that plays out when politics drives too many decisions and gets in the way of a restructuring effort. Politics can quickly undermine and weaken the very structure that it supports as a "fix" to what the politicians assert is broken.
- There are far more teachers who are willing to embrace a new decision making model and accept the new roles and responsibilities that go with this model than I could have imagined. But when continuity of leadership breaks down regularly, the support that teachers need disappears, too. Energy is zapped. More dashed hopes infiltrate the collective psyche of the staff.
- Decentralizing decision making and opting for a SBM governance structure is analogous to being in a room with two exit doors. Door A is the way we have always done it; it's comfortable, predictable, and safe (even if it is wrought with concerns or minimum levels of effectiveness). Door B is SBM. It's new, requires significant change in roles and responsibilities, as well as a significant amount of ambiguity. But it offers hope, promise, and great potential to benefit the students in ways that the current system doesn't. The problem, however, is quite simple: Door A has an exponentially greater gravitational pull on it than Door B.
Source: Dr. Sandra Griffin, course author.
[1] www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/envrnmnt/go/go100.htm "Critical issue: Transferring decision making to local schools:site-based management." NCREL