A major reason for the popularity of site-based management (SBM) in educational reform is that it hinges on the deceptively simple principle that decentralizing school decision making will lead to improved performance. After all, who better to make important decisions for a school than the administration and faculty of that school, along with their local community? But what does research say?
School Administrators Like It...
School administrators have largely embraced SBM. Of 1,347 subscribers of The American School Board Journal who responded to a survey by Gaul, Underwood, and Fortune (1994), 70 percent reported that SBM was used in their schools; 68 percent credited SBM with empowering their teachers, and 62 percent felt that SBM gave them more autonomy for designing their educational programs.
Similarly, of 149 principals in Indiana and Minnesota who responded to a survey by Kowalski (1994), approximately 88 percent agreed with these three statements: "SBM is a sound concept for school governance," "Meaningful change is more likely to occur at the school level than the district or state level," and "Involvement with SBM encourages teachers to assume higher levels of responsibility."
...But Does it Affect Student Outcomes?
Only 61 percent of the Kowalski respondents, however, felt that "SBM has produced meaningful improvements in education." The issue thus appears to be not whether educators like SBM, but whether it has a quantifiable impact on student performance.
To date, there has been "scant evidence that schools get better just because decisions are made closer to the classroom" (Wohlstetter et al. 1997, p. vii). Since SBM was implemented in all of New Zealand's 2,666 state schools in 1989, Wylie (1995-96) has conduct-ed four surveys of principals, trustees, teachers, and parents. Even with all these data, she acknowledges that "there are no definitive answers" (p. 56) to the question of whether the shift to SBM had an impact on student learning in New Zealand. To be sure, there are positive signs, such as more attention paid to the assessment of elementary students and increased communication with parents. But Wylie also cites negative effects, such as a concomitant increase in elementary principals' workload, from 48 to 60 hours per week between 1989 and 1990. Further, some administrators noted that their local autonomy came at the expense of increased paperwork and accountability to governmen agencies; in effect, state control was still present under SBM, just in a different guise.
In one of the few studies that has looked directly at student outcomes resulting from SBM-type reforms, Jenkins and colleagues (1994) selected 23 Washington State schools to participate in a program emphasizing school-based, participatory decision making to improve performance for low-achieving students. After receiving training for the promotion of educational change, the principals worked with their staff in year one to design reforms to improve services and instruction for their lowest performing students. They implemented these changes in year two. Teachers were surveyed and students tested in both the second and third years to ascertain teachers' impressions of the process and to quantify any changes in student performance and behavior.
The results? Teachers welcomed the changes: 75 percent indicated they had input into the new program, and 87 percent said they supported the program. However, a comparison of scores on the Metropolitan Achievement Test (MAT-6) between students in the program and a control group revealed no significant differences in reading, math, or spelling. Further, comparisons between the groups on the Child Behavior Checklist-Teacher Report Form revealed no significant changes in the behavior of the students.
Why No Change?
Proponents of SBM suggest that schools show a lack of change in student outcomes not necessarily because they adopt SBM, but rather because they do so in isolation. Hill, Bonan, and Warner (1992) studied five major school systems that had adopted SBM. Their first two conclusions were that SBM requires a reform of an entire school system, not just individual schools, and that SBM works only if it is the focal point of the reform effort, not just one of several concurrent efforts. Although Fullan (1995) feels that SBM shows some promise, he concludes that it often diverts attention to changes in school governance structures, rather than to the "radical reculturing" of the school and the "basic redesign" of teaching needed to bring about real educational reform.
Similarly, after studying 40 schools in three countries, Wohlstetter and colleagues (1997) concluded that to bring about real change in student learning, SBM must be augmented by (1) organizational conditions that encourage interactions among stakeholders, and (2) far-reaching curricular and instructional reforms that can guide those interactions.
On one level, SBM appears already to have succeeded: It has enjoyed fairly widespread support among educators and the public. Without such support, any reform movement faces an uphill battle. Yet the research also emphasizes that site-based management is only a means to an end, not the end itself. To be considered truly useful, SBM must be tied to real reform in how educators interact with one another and in how they teach their students.
