Two years ago, the Board of Education adopted a new governance model
recommended by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) called the
“Key Work of School
Boards.” The Key Works is a systems approach designed to
promote educational excellence and accountability through vision,
standards, assessment, alignment, and continuous progress.
It is modeled in part on the Baldrige excellence model that leads to
the Malcolm Baldridge Excellence awards in education and business. Board Policy 5(B) adopted in 2006 states:
The Board of Education operates under the National School Boards
Association Key Works Framework. It focuses governance on the Vision
and Mission, High Standards of Excellence, Assessment, Accountability,
Alignment, Climate and Culture, Collaboration, and Continuous
Improvement.
You may have seen the first fruits of the Key Work process in the Core Values
for the District that we show before each televised board meeting.
Those core values (Academic Excellence, Committment to
Individual Learners, Multicultural Energy, More
Opportunities, and Leadership) and the detailed descriptors were
developed by a Community Relations Task Force co-chaired by Dennis Host
and Marj Hawkins and then approved by the Board of Education.
The purpose of the Key Work process is to focus the school board on
things that count--the big picture issues that involve policy such as
standards, goals and accountability. The Key Work process
envisions a collaborative process that allocates operational and
leadership responsibilities to the Superintendent and his leadership
team, and policy making functions to the Board of Education. But
we know that to be meaningful, a quality planning process cannot occur
in a vacuum. It is critical that the professionals who carry
forward the mission of our district be involved in a meaningful and
proactive way. The standards that we set, the objectives we set,
must be meaningful to professional staff and they must reflect the
values of our community. For that reason, we are inviting
selected teacher leadership, administrator leadership and others to the
May 14 workshop.
Many of you have been confronted with questions about whether our
students are achieving as well as they might. We board members
have been confronted with state and federal quality reporting tools
which we know do not accurately measure the excellent progress that our
students are making. Some of these tools treat a school as
failing if a single small sub-population within that school falls below
an arbitrary measurement standard. We struggle with the state
and nationally developed standards that sometimes make great teachers
and great schools look as though they have failed, when in fact, they
have made tremendous progress as measured by the annual growth of the
real students in those schools.
But we cannot convincingly tell our community that State and national
accountability tools are inaccurate, unless we have something else that
credibly provides accountability. We must adopt our own
measurement tools that inspire public confidence, so that we can
assure the public that we are maintaining excellence and making
progress where we need improvement. The District's leadership has
begun to look at growth based measurement tools, and we are inclined to
think that this holds the key developing accountability. How can
we use the new measurement tools in conjunction with standards of
excellence? How can we use those tools to assure that we are
making improvements where improvements are needed?
At the workshop, we hope to begin to answer some basic questions:
- Who should be involved in the next steps of the Key Works process and how?
- What is a reasonable time frame for the next steps? When
should the superintendent recommend, and the board adopt, a schedule
for these steps?
- How can we involve teachers and administrators in a meaningful way?
- How should the Board's process coordinate with other ongoing
efforts that involve planning and progress such as school strategic
planning, quality? compensation, curriculum development, implementation
of new data measurement and reporting techniques?
- Does development of a standard and accountability framework
contribute to public support for providing the district with the
revenues that it needs?
- How do we make sure that any process is sufficiently ambituous to
contribute to continues progress, while recognizing the practical
limits of the institution to make change?
If you are reading this on the internet, you can link to some materials
that will help you get prepared for the workshop. Those materials
include a powerpoint
produced by the National School Boards Association that explains the
idea behind the Key Work of School Boards. To review the power
point, click on the link and either download the powerpoint or run it
from the internet. We've also prepared an example of what a Balanced Scorecard
might look like. Keep in mind this is just an example. If
we use the balanced scorecard approach, the real one would result from
a planning process involving stakeholders. Then, we've included
some links
to places you might get more information on strategicl planning by
school districts, and the use of the balanced scorecard in school
districts. Finally, we've created a simple example of what a single set
of strategic objectives might look like; again, its just an example.
If you aren't looking at the internet now, you can access these materials from the District website.
We will be distributing additional materials to people who accept our
invitation to the workshop. We hope to see you there?
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