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January 09, 2008
Schools Need Autonomy
One long awaited reform is greater autonomy for schools within a district. Principals and teachers say they would accept accountability if they had the authority to change their program. When decisions about a school's program, staffing and budget are made elsewhere, the principal and teachers can argue that those decisions did not meet their needs and hence accountability rests with the district.
A celebrated pending case is the Bruce Randolph School in Denver. A new principal worked collaboratively with staff to increase student learning and made progress. Now the staff wants to make more changes but continuously runs into cumbersome district and union procedures. They petitioned the district for greater leeway in decisions. The district school board unanimously agreed. Despite an urgent appeal to the teacher union, it has yet to agree to changes. Now Colorado legislators may take those decisions out of the hands of districts and unions by granting schools site authority over decisions through "innovation zones."
This cry for greater freedom by school staffs to make decisions has a long history. For a time, site based management was the reform movement. But that turned out to be hollow as districts agreed to the words but not the intent and schools still had to play, "Captain, May I."
Some districts have forged ahead with school site management. The most famous is Edmonton, Canada where all 190 schools control their budget, staffing and program. Boston has its Pilot schools, New York and Chicago are experimenting with giving successful schools autonomy. Sadly, however, there is little progress to report on this decades-old promising reform. Tradition and top-down management have fierce holds on education with few signs of changing those controls. That becomes the main drive for teachers and principals starting charter schools in states with charter school laws granting school autonomy.
Posted by Wayne Jennings at January 9, 2008 06:53 AM
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