District/School Administration Administration
Education Reform

First Annual Implementation Report

Analysis Of Strategic Goal III:

Goal III. Work with school districts to create a governance structure that encourages innovation and accountability.

Introduction.

The main focus of this goal during the first year of implementation has been to support school districts in transforming their governance structure from a top down model that risks a lack of accountability, to a school-based model in which principals and superintendents now have the authority and accountability to act as CEO's of their respective parts of the system.

School-Based Management

The primary change to the governance structure occurred at the school level. The Education Reform Act transferred the authority to make most staffing and operational decisions to the school principal. Within each school, the principal now has the authority to hire, evaluate, and, if necessary, dismiss teachers and other staff. In addition, within the framework established by the school committee, principals are now authorized to make all purchasing and curriculum decisions. As part of this transition, principals are expected to operate as professional managers and are no longer included in collective bargaining units. To assist principals in managing this increased authority, Education Reform required every school to establish a school council by mid-October. Each school council is co-chaired by the principal and consists of representatives from the parent group, teachers union, community, and, at the secondary level, students.

Because school councils have only advisory authority, some councils found it initially difficult to define a meaningful role. While the success of a school council ultimately depends on the individual principal's ability to lead an open and participatory process, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and statewide professional associations have provided resource materials and training to assist principals in their new roles. During the Spring, a network of thirteen districts that model school-based management was established to help lead future efforts. Additional resource materials and an exciting new video will be distributed to schools over the summer.

Charter Schools.

The ultimate extension of school-based management is the creation of fully autonomous charter schools. The Education Reform Act authorizes the Secretary of Education to grant charters for up to twenty five schools to operate independently of the school district in which it is located. These charter schools will be public schools and will be funded similarly to all other public schools, but they offer an opportunity for educators to pilot new programs, free from many district and state constraints.

During the first year of implementation, fifteen charters and five conditional charters were granted for schools to open in September, 1995. Of these schools, some target specific underserved populations. For example, a charter was granted to a proposed school at Fort Devens to offer a full-time residential school and home to foster children. Other charters were granted to schools that plan on piloting innovative programs. The charter granted to Youth Build Boston, for example, would expand its current program to create a full school operated as an on-the-job construction class room.

School Performance Standards.

As with the other main areas of Education Reform, the success of school-based management and charter schools will be evaluated based on a set of statewide performance standards. Since a school's success is measured mostly by the success of its students, the development of school standards will depend substantially on those developed first for students. There are, however, certain interim indicators, such as attendance and drop-out rates, that can be used to provide initial benchmarks of school performance. For Education Reform to succeed, schools must be accountable for their performance. This accountability is critical both to the state and local governments which entrust their funds to schools and to the parents who entrust their children to schools.

State Accountability for School Performance.

The Education Reform Act directs the Board of Education to establish a system for evaluating the performance of each school. The results of this evaluation will be used to publicize successful models and provide additional support to those schools that are not making consistent progress towards the state standards. Particular attention will be focused on charter schools and other schools that are piloting innovations. This process of objectively evaluating different educational models is absolutely essential to bringing about the type of systemic reforms that many educators have worked on for years. While a tremendous amount of work has gone in to school restructuring efforts such as the Coalition of Essential objective statewide standards to evaluate the effectiveness of these approaches. If, as is expected, these approaches can be shown to increase student performance, their successes can be replicated throughout the state. Approaches that do not demonstrate improvements in student performance should not be replicated.

The Education Reform Act also directs the Commissioner to take additional steps on behalf students in those schools determined to be " chronically under-performing" including the appointment of a receiver to replace the principal. This receiver will have enhanced authority to reorganize or replace staff and will report directly to the Commissioner. Because it is not possible to determine under-performance without first defining performance, the Commissioner will not exercise this authority until school standards are established.

Accountability to Parents and Students.

Ultimately, if schools are to become true service organizations, they must be accountable to the consumers of their services, parents and students. Historically only some parents and students have had the means to choose what school they felt best met their needs. School choice increases the number of parents and students who have access to this choice, but a lack of reliable information has made it impossible to make an informed decision based on the strengths and weaknesses of a particular school.

To fill this need, the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and Executive Office of Education have been working jointly for over a year to publish informational profiles on each school and district. These profiles will make public the same information that the state uses to evaluate schools. The profiles will enable parents and students to make their own determinations of the quality of a school and will assist each community in evaluating the performance of its schools.

Collection of School and District Information.

Education Reform has dramatically increased both the quality and quantity of information that schools, districts, and the state need to exchange. During the first year of Reform, much of this effort was ad hoc in response to immediate implementation needs. In addition to the comprehensive bi-annual report that districts have traditionally filed, separate surveys were undertaken in areas such as time and learning, school facilities, student expulsion, use of new funds, English as Second Language (ESL) teachers, technology, and school councils. In future years, all efforts will be made to coordinate and simplify these requests for information. Technology will play a major role in increasing the efficiency of this process. Over the next two years, an electronic network will be established in which standardized student and staff records and school budgets can be shared between schools, districts, and the state. These networked databases will significantly increase the efficiency with which data is collected and the timeliness and accessibility with which it can be analyzed and made available.

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