A Board's Refrain: 'How Are Things Going?'.

How long would a superintendent remain if the answer to the question above were, "Compared to what?"

Or this: "How is the budget progressing?"

Answer: "Compared to what?"

It sounds flippant, but that's the answer a school board deserves when it hands its superintendent that common query. Against what standard is it asking the administrator to assess progress? Boards commonly ask those kinds of unqualified questions, and superintendents struggle to answer.

Boards say, "Give us a report on this and that. We want more data." But their underlying message is: "We're trying to keep up with what's going on here."

Abdicated Role

School boards are morally and legally accountable, possessing the right to know how things are going, and superintendents are obligated to tell them. Board members are doing their jobs as best they know how. But what do they really want to know, and what criteria should they use in making a judgment of how things are? What are the established board values against which administrative performance can be judged?

What the board really wants to know is, "Are you putting our money where our mouth is?" To this, one must ask first if its mouth has been somewhere. Has it stated its priorities for the district in policy, or has it abdicated that precious leadership role to staff members, who are not directly accountable to the ownership?

Often, the superintendent has no idea what the board wants to know. And, sadly, neither does the board.

That's frightening because not knowing what one is looking for in a haystack is worse than searching for the proverbial needle. In the latter you'll recognize the object if your search turns it up. But when a board asks how things are going and has defined neither the "things" nor the standards for judging success, it sets itself up for a fruitless exploration.

A Halting Response

Still the exploration is relentless. When school boards forage through piles of data, they should ask, "What are the standards of ethics and prudence that we would not approve? If we could be sure whether or not certain prudent and ethical standards had been met, what would they be?"

When those questions are raised, they produce halting answers. True, each board member may have a personal set of judgment standards. However, the board as a body may have none.

When the board reviews a budget, for instance, it generally seeks additional information. What other reason can there be? Each trustee knows what values he or she personally holds regarding financial planning. They compare the document to those values and are guided individually to either approve or reject.

But if those values are important enough to guide board judgment after budget completion, shouldn't they have been expressed at the onset--before time and money were spent in document preparation?

For school boards that call themselves "proactive boards of policy," what more clearly could express a reactive stance than approving a budget put together by staff, using its own values rather than those that should have been expressed proactively by the board?

Seeking Objectivity

John Carver, creator of a model known as Policy Governance, says, "When a board wallows through budget approval, it has 10,000 answers in need of just a few good questions. If a board were to succeed at one thing, it should be to decide initially what those few good questions are. Then administrators would have something against which they could confidently be judged."

If criteria have not been set succinctly by the board, then assessment of any performance report will be solely subjective. What could be more unfair than having one's fate dependent on the day-to-day idiosyncrasies of seven people on a board?

The board's need to be informed is paramount. But its inquiry should be specific, aimed not like a shotgun blast, but like rifle fire: "How are things with regard to our stated expectation in Policy No. such-and-such, concerning thus-and-so?"

The superintendent's response should be just as clearly stated--to specifically inform the board's wisdom in each area of legitimate inquiry. Thus, not only is administrative subterfuge discouraged, but when such values are expressed proactively so that the entire board can use them to make a universal assessment, then the retort, "Compared to what?" is answered up front--as it should be.

Gene Royer, a consultant on school governance based in Houston, is the author of School Board Leadership 2000, published by Brockton Publishing Co.