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Illinois School Board Journal
July/August 2006

Delegating decisions from a balcony view

by Linda Dawson

Linda Dawson is IASB director of editorial services and Journal editor.

School board members often come from business backgrounds where they make decisions on their own and have control over minute details of projects. And even if such responsibilities are not part of an official job description, as adults they make decisions daily that are theirs and theirs alone.

As a member of a school board, however, decisions must be made as a group of seven. And because legally they must confirm contracts and budgets, as well as approve bills, many boards fall into the trap of trying to make decisions that should best be left to staff.

A distinction between board work and staff work is made by Richard Broholm and Douglas Johnson in their book, A Balcony Perspective: Clarifying the Trustee Role:

"The board is a reflective body by virtue of its structure and distance from the daily action. This gives board members an overview perspective as compared to staff which can be found in a more active role. By being removed from the frenetic daily action of the organization and having the larger perspective that distance provides, trustee boards are in a unique place to provide wise counsel to staff.

"Boards are not, however, structured or positioned to assume leadership command in which individual accountability and initiating authority are critical for quick response to daily problems that confront most organizations. When they work to complement each other, the hierarchical command structure of staff organizations and the non-hierarchical, consensual structure of trustee boards create a powerful collaborative team."

While the cover story for this Journal describes the current climate as schools meet federal and state requirements to have highly qualified teachers in every classroom, interviewing and selecting the best candidates are not part of the board's role. If a board follows IASB's Foundational Principals of Effective Governance, those duties are best delegated to the superintendent.

From its balcony perspective, the board's role is to set expectations for meeting the goal of a highly qualified teacher in every classroom and deciding exactly what that would look like for their district. Then the superintendent would be charged to interview and recommend the best candidates to fill those expectations.

"Boards can confidently delegate this authority if they have clearly stated - in policy - their expectations for and/or parameters around staff recruitment and hiring," said Angela D. Peifer, IASB's senior director for board development.

She cites the example of a school board with a district-level goal of inculcating the value of community and volunteerism in its students. "In order to advance this goal," she said, "the board added policy language about their expectation that all new hires would show evidence of a commitment to volunteerism."

The importance of setting clear expectations also becomes apparent when a school board winds up in unintended situations, as evidenced by a large urban district that was hiring several new building principals.

"When the final recommendations were made to the board," Peifer said, "all recommended candidates were middle-aged, white men. While the entire board agreed that the candidates were the best qualified for the positions, some on the board were very unhappy about the lack of diversity among the group.

"Here, the issue was not in who the superintendent recommended, but with the recruitment process that didn't seem to attract women and racially diverse applicants. If the board had included policy language specifying its expectation that recruitment efforts do that, the ensuing ‘brouhaha' probably would have been avoided."

Clarity at the contract level

In addition to adding policy language that reflects strategic goals, the board also can clarify its position by matching the superintendent's contract with district-wide expectations.

When IASB field service representatives meet with boards, they often encourage them to write down, in policy, how they are delegating their authority to manage the district and provide leadership for the staff, said Dave Love, field services director for divisions in Southern and East Central Illinois.

"We also suggest that boards discuss and write down their expectations for their superintendent," Love added. "This would be another place for the board to state the level of quality they expect for new hires to the district."

This relates to the May/June Journal cover story on the board's role of having just one employee - the superintendent - who is held responsible for the day-to-day operations that Broholm and Johnson referred to above.

With the delegation of greater degrees of authority comes the opportunity to hold the superintendent and staff to higher degrees of accountability.

"In other words," said Dawn E. Miller, field services director for IASB divisions in Northern Illinois, "if the staff is not doing their jobs, the superintendent who is responsible for all hiring is held accountable. If, however, the board hired all the staff, they would not be able to hold the superintendent accountable for a decision they chose to make.

"Although legally the board confirms all hires," Miller added, "they do this on the recommendation of the superintendent. The role for the board is to have policies in place designed to provide guidance and parameters around hiring practices."

No one said it would be easy

As stated at the outset, those accustomed to making high-level decisions are often reticent to give up those powers just because they take on a trustee role as a member of a school board. A Balcony Perspective recognizes the difficulty in assuming a different type of leadership role and offers this:

"Relying on authority figures who lead by providing answers does not work when we face truly adaptive challenges. In the short run, we may welcome the quick authoritative answer. But in the long run, we tend to resist these answers because we never participated in the hard and painful work of developing and owning them."

From a balcony perspective, the school board is in a unique position to shape the ever-changing needs of a district while empowering staff to be creative and innovative in the way they meet challenges. By setting policies and providing direction, the board provides a destination for the superintendent and staff but does not insist that they take just one particular route to get to that destination.

To be able to do that, a high level of trust also must exist between the board and the superintendent and staff. Such relationships demand a clear vision of expectations that can only be achieved by making certain that all voices of the community are reflected in the destination.

But when it all comes together - when the board delegates authority to the superintendent, who in turn delegates to the staff - the board actually frees more of its time to operate from that balcony perspective.

"When the board gets clear about what it wants and why, and communicates that to the superintendent," Peifer said, "it can comfortably step back and allow the superintendent to do his or her job.

"At that point, the board can hold the superintendent to a very high level of accountability for the results of his or her recommendations. If the board won't let go of this responsibility, then they must be willing to accept the responsibility for the results - good or bad."