LETTERS.

Right on Target

GORDON CAWELTI

Project Director, Alliance for Curriculum Referm, Arlington, Virginia

Your March issue focusing on decentralization and site-based management is very much on target in helping superintendents manage the important quest for sustained efforts to improve student learning.

The article by Sidney Trubowitz on chairing a site-based council reveals realities from the teacher's perspective, and the research synthesis by Anita Summers and Amy Johnson helps understand the efforts of pioneering urban districts such as Chicago, New York, Edmonton, and Dade County as they sought to break the seemingly intractable sluggishness of large bureaucracies.

That research thus far reveals the limited efficacy of site-based management should come as no surprise to those who understand the problems of curriculum alignment, goal ambiguity, and the difficulty of early and sustained focus of teams on the achievement of students.

However, despite all the work of the policy wonks in the state capitals and Washington to legislate learning, one hopes it is becoming clear that teams of teachers must learn to work together regularly to help diverse students attain significantly higher levels of achievement. Those superintendents who provide leadership in assuring such teams have the training, time, resources, and expectations needed to focus on improving achievement soon will begin to see results.

The revolution led by Tom Peters and W. Edwards Deming in the corporate sector ultimately has resulted in highly competitive products and services when front-line employees were given this responsibility. Many school leaders now understand this idea, and I hope AASA will continue to seek fresh and novel ways to sustain the quality movement lest it fade along with other fads and movements.

If schools don't restructure their workplaces to facilitate team focus on student learning, we can safely predict that future research summaries also will yield flat or declining results in school productivity.

Dispelling a Myth

LOUIS WILDMAN

Professor, Educational Administration, California State University, Bakersfield, California

Michael Imber's guest column, "What Do Educational Administrators Really Know?" (April 1995), suggests the popular myth that there is a difference between the educational administration "knowledge base" as identified by practitioners and professors.

In contrast, our study ("A Knowledge Base in Educational Administration," in The First Yearbook of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration) found close agreement on 16 of 17 major categories in our outline of the knowledge base. The only significant disagreement pertained to the importance of research methods. Understandably, university faculty are far more concerned about research methodology than practitioners.

In the 1800s, the medical profession trained its members through apprenticeships in medical clinics. But by the turn of the century--despite town-gown tensions--that profession realized physicians should be much more broadly educated in medical schools with nationally recruited faculty. The education profession is going through that same transition.

While "few teachers are comfortable with either open-ended instruction or genuine inquiry" based on constructivist learning theory, as Carolyn Cooper states in her article on gifted education in the same issue, I think it would be fair to observe that few administrators are comfortable shifting from "common sense practice to "research guided" practice. Nevertheless, this change is noticed both in professional practice and in the quality of articles in the professional literature.

Consider the contemporary portfolio movement. After research confirmed the low predictive validity of selection interviews and recognized that a much better predictor of future performance is past performance, the use of portfolios in the selection process has grown enormously over the past few years. This development is encouraging and illustrates how research in educational administration is being adopted by the profession.

Reinforcing Goodness

GARY COMPTON

Superintendent, Cedarburg School District, Cedarburg, Wisconsin

In the past few years, a number of prominent educators have become convinced t at, beyond the traditional course content, there may be some value to teaching and reinforcing character and goodness.

To his credit, Karl Hertz, in his guest column, "Seize the Teaching Moment in Behalf of Goodness" (March 1995), focuses on the many problems our children face in society and in their homes, yet does not shy away from our obligation and opportunity to stress the positive aspects of teaching children the value of simply being good.