LETTERS.

Budget Sharing

BY E.E. "GENE" DAVIS 

Associate Professor of Education Administration, Idaho State University, Pocatello, Idaho 

I believe shared decision making in budget reduction and/or budget development is critical to the success of school boards and superintendents in obtaining and reallocating scarce resources. I compliment James Mitchell and Sheri Williams for taking this approach in their Focus article ("Reducing Budgets Through Shared Decision Making," March 1994).

However, I am convinced shared decision making is not generally used when dealing with a budget crisis for three reasons:

* A clearly delineated process, until now, has not been developed and field tested;

* Many superintendents and school boards do not believe they can afford to involve others, except in a limited way (certainly no more than board hearings) because they don't want people to get overly excited if the projected downturn does not materialize; and

* Many superintendents and school boards believe they should "hold close to their vest" key information only they should review or discuss.

My experience is that people usually believe the check is in the mail.

I have developed and used a shared decision-making process in several districts to achieve budget reductions ranging from $2.7 million to $16.9 million. I have documented an outline of the process on cassette through Audio-Education and am writing a book about it for Technomic Publishing Co.

An Author Responds

BY SUSAN CHASE

Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Tulsa, Oklahoma 

I would like to respond to some observations of superintendent search consultant Samuel Cohen in his letter ("A View of Women," September 1994).

As Colleen Bell and I traveled to 27 school districts across the country between 1986 and 1989, we frequently heard one of the ideas he expressed: "With the overwhelming majority of graduate students in education in this area being women, I expect an increasing number of women superintendents as present holders of those positions retire." This certainly seems like a reasonable prediction, yet I think it is accurate to say the increases in the number of women in the superintendency continue to be slow.

In our survey of all 50 state departments of education, we found women accounted for 2.8 percent of K-12 superintendents in 1986-87, 4.2 percent in 1989-90, and 5.6 percent in 199192. An increase, yes, but not an explosive one. We wonder whether retirements are not occurring as quickly as some had predicted.

As a sociologist who has general knowledge about women and work in the 20th century (as opposed to a historian with specific knowledge about educational administration), I found very interesting Cohen's observations about the changes in women's attitudes toward leadership positions. I think the generalizations from his own experience probably mirror larger patterns, but one important idea needs to be added here.

Historians and sociologists of women's work argue cogently that changes in women's attitudes toward work have to be understood in relation to the context of opportunities. Alice Kessler-Harris, author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States, argues from historical data that women (in general) have taken up opportunities for greater advancement and higher pay when those opportunities presented themselves. Thus, I suggest that during the mid-1950s and early '60s when Cohen found women uninterested in leadership positions, something in addition to women's greater commitment to marriage and family may have been operating. In other words, attitudes are shaped in part by changing social structures.

Cohen's final point echoed an idea we presented in our article: Whether women appear to be "tough" or "feminine," they may be subject to scrutiny and criticism. Male superintendents, too, are scrutinized and criticized, but not because they are men. The explanation for this is simply that men are understood as the norm in leadership positions. That idea must change.

Finally, our research does not bear out his observation that women school board members are more hostile to women leaders than men school board members. Although we heard that idea expressed a number of times, we found most women school board members sensitive to the problems women superintendents face.