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Illinois School Board Journal
May-June 1999

The seven deadly sins of school board governance

By Russell Edwards

In the media, in the legislature, and almost everywhere you look, you hear various reasons why American public education is failing. Are there ways board members actually contribute to the failure of public education?

There are numerous ways that board members can stall educational progress or derail it altogether. The ways listed here have been pointed out by various authorities. It is easy for even experienced board members to fall into these pitfalls.

Following are the Seven Deadly Sins of School Board Governance.

• Political game playing. Many insist that politics are not, or should not be, embedded in the board of education -- but that does not make it so. Politics always has been, and always will be, a part of school board governance. Those naive enough to resist politics at every turn may be doing their school districts one grave disservice: they would be allowing the career politician who uses politics in every decision to wrest control away from the majority of the board through political posturing and political game playing.

The board member who wants nothing to do with politics always strives to work with others as a team. In the meantime, however, the politician, in an ever so subtle way, may try to steer the majority of the board of education toward his or her personal solutions. If the politician does not get his or her way, he or she may prevent the full board from implementing any solution at all.

Politics does not have to be viewed as a totally negative thing on a school board. Politics can sometimes play an important role in reining in the career politician on the board and preventing the political game playing from diverting the board's true aim.

Politics can be a powerful tool that can be used to stop the career politician in his or her tracks. One must first understand the game of politics so as to be able to recognize what is happening when the career politician on the board begins using negative methods to reach his or her own end. The antidote to any board member displaying negative political behavior is called "majority rule." Other board members who understand these methods can stop the career politician short.

• Lack of Leadership. Leadership comes in many shapes and forms. At one end of the spectrum you may have an autocrat on the board of education who tends to want power and make all of the decisions. The autocrat wants to tell everyone within the school system when to jump and just how high to jump. After all, the board of education is the boss, right?

The absolute democrat is the direct opposite to the autocrat and tends to not lead at all. This type of leadership allows those within the educational system to do whatever it is that they want to do with education.

True leadership can be fleeting on a board of education because the board of education is made up of seven or more elected people all sharing equal power, with each member falling somewhere along the continuum from autocrat to absolute democrat. Therefore, the board of education can be in a constant struggle that is always debating just what kind of leadership style is best.

Leadership can end up in constant flux. After one election, the majority of the board may behave more autocratically, and after another election the leadership may move toward a more democratic style of leadership. One result can be that those within the educational system experience a fickle leadership and have trouble trusting the school board and working within the district structure.

True leadership may be in allowing those within the educational system to have more control over their work by embracing the idea that shared power truly results in ideal leadership.

• The elected expert. It is not hard to understand that a person who runs for, and is elected to, the board of education gains a certain implied expertise. A person who is campaigning to become a board member points to any and every strength that he or she possesses to obtain votes. After saying it out loud so many times, a board member can come to believe that he or she is indeed the expert of campaign rhetoric.

After the election, it is only a confident person who resists the temptation of believing his or her own rhetoric. The desire to believe in one's own expertise is an aphrodisiac that many cannot resist.

The truth is that while we may all be experts in one area or another, most board members are truly not experts in the larger topic of educating our children. The elected board member, who is the boss, must be able to give up control and accept the recommendation of those district staff who were educated, trained and hired to be the experts.

• Disregarding expert advice. Many school boards include one or more members who ran for and were elected on a particular platform -- for instance, opening a new school in the district.

These singular issues can stop educational progress in its tracks so unequivocally that schools can easily digress rather than progress. Simply put, the elected person believes that he or she was elected on the strength of his or her campaign platform and, therefore, must follow through with every single promise made. Only the strong-willed can admit to themselves, their peers, and the public that they may have been wrong in the first place.

The answer may be in coming to the realization that no one comes to the position of school board member with all of the facts, statistics, and empirical proof regarding every single issue surrounding American public education. All board members must understand that they do not have all of the correct answers, and must be open minded enough to admit that their individual realms of knowledge are often insufficient and sometimes incorrect.

Who must we rely upon then? Ourselves as individuals? Many times board members have limited understanding of education, and educational solutions. It is imperative that during the heat of any debate, school board members hold the true experts' opinions in the highest regard. Only in this way can the dual value of lay board and professional staff be realized.

• Never giving up a belief, no matter what. Board members should not come to the position with pre-supposed ideas or a closed mind. When you are elected, it is paramount that you will be able to admit to yourself and your colleagues that you are sometimes wrong in your thinking and in your assessment.

The only way to accomplish this is by being able to accept information and various points of view which may be disputing your personal beliefs. Statistical evidence and empirical proof is there for all of us to rely upon and give us direction.

When either the statistical evidence or empirical proof is before us, we may debate the information, but we should use every effort to refute a position using other evidence, logic and reasoning. It is unfair to fellow board members to maliciously stick to your guns for no other reason than it is just the way you feel, or because you simply believe in your heart that it is wrong for the children.

If a board member has particular feelings and emotions surrounding any particular issue, his or her judgment may be clouded. Every board member should do his or her best to support their beliefs with something other than "touchy feely" kinds of evidence. When the information before you is overwhelmingly in opposition to your personal beliefs, you should be strong enough to admit that you may be wrong.

• Compromise away the board's best decisions. When some board members can not get what they are after, they often times try to compromise to at least end up with a variation of what they were after. When board member A wants solution A, and the information, and the majority of the board overwhelmingly supports solution B, board member A should have an open mind enough to support the majority decision.

Sometimes, board member A debates, and tries to manipulate to at least have some of their solution included in what the majority of the board supports as a solution. Conversely, the majority of the board believes that they should be team players when these kinds of behaviors manifest themselves. The team player has the mistaken belief that if all board members are satisfied, this must be the best solution.

In reality, when the majority of the board of education compromises away the best solution on any given issue, the children, teachers, principals, and citizens can ultimately end up with less. After compromising, board members are more apt to change their minds when the citizens come to a board meeting complaining about any particular decision made. A board member who has compromised away the best solution to placate another board member will have a greater propensity to reverse his or her decision because he or she has less ownership in any compromise solution.

Unfortunately, most decisions board members make do not impact them personally. But most decisions a board member makes impact everyone else within the educational system, including the principals, teachers, custodians, the maintenance men, and the children. Board members must take decisions and their implications seriously.

• Being disengaged from staff/community. There is so much discussion regarding better communication with community and staff that one can easily fall prey to the idea that as long as we talk about better communication, better communication will result.

Every year, at any board meeting across the USA where goals are set, better communication with community and staff is discussed, and often embraced as a district goal. It is as if better communication takes place simply because we want it to.

When boards of education do less than an ideal job communicating with community and staff, one definite measurable outcome results: staff and community has a greater chance at becoming isolated and therefore disengaged -- disengaged from district goals, disengaged from the schools needs, and disengaged from the direction that the district is moving in.

One end result can be that many in the community and within the staff lose sight of the overall plan that the administration and board of education may have set in motion. Various entities can begin to pull in different directions in order to provide quality education. To keep the community and staff engaged, boards of education must pay more than lip service to improving communication.

Ideal communication must be worked at and improved upon. It does not happen by chance. Once communication is made a goal, we cannot presume that it is continually happening in the most proficient manner. A sad reality is that in some school districts, staff are informed in a large degree through hearsay and rumor, and community is informed through newspaper reporting. These methods are not an ideal replacement for good accurate communication.

Will the seven deadly sins ever be totally extinguished from school board governance and completely rejected by school board members? If the answer is no, then what might be extinguished is school board governance as we know it today. These destructive behaviors have in the past caused state legislatures to take corrective action themselves. The corrective action, sadly, moves school board governance away from local control as we know it. Observation will confirm that corrective policy has always moved school governance toward centralized control. Is this what we want for our schools and our communities? Or will school board members rise to the challenge of overcoming the "deadly sins" that lead to interference with local governance?

Russell Edwards served as a school board member for eight years and achieved distinction as a Master School Board Member through the professional development program of the Illinois Association of School Boards. He published a book about his experience in 1999, How Boards of Education Are Failing Your Children. (P.O. Box 268, Lyons, Illinois 60534)