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After years of waiting for solid evidence that school-based management (SBM) leads to improved school performance, educators and policy makers are questioning the wisdom of using decentralized management to reform education. Many people say that the best decisions about education are those made closest to the students, but few realize the extent of systemwide change that SBM entails. Often an SBM system is implemented simply by setting up a council at the school site and giving the council at least some responsibility in the areas of budget, personnel, and curriculum. It is assumed that individual school councils understand their new roles and responsibilities and will take appropriate action to improve school performance.
For more than three years, my colleagues and I at the Center on Educational Governance at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles have been studying schools and school districts in the United States, Canada, and Australia to find out what makes SBM work.(1) The purpose of the research was to identify the conditions in schools that promote high performance through SBM. We defined "high-performance SBM" as occurring in schools that were actively restructuring in the areas of curriculum and instruction; these were schools in which SBM worked well. We compared this group of successful schools to schools that were using SBM but with less success in making changes that affected teaching and learning.
We visited a total of 44 schools in 13 school districts and interviewed more than 500 people, from school board members, superintendents, and associate superintendents in district offices to principals, teachers, parents, and students. All the schools we studied--which included elementary, middle, and high schools--had been operating under SBM for at least four years, and some of them much longer.(2)
In brief, we found that successful SBM requires a redesign of the whole school organization that goes far beyond a change in school governance. For SBM to work, people at the school site must have "real" authority over budget, personnel, and curriculum. Equally important, if SBM is to help improve school performance, that authority must be used to introduce changes in the functioning of the school that actually affect teaching and learning.
The school's strategy for using its new power must include strategies for decentralizing three other essential...