Kentucky's transition to school-based decision making began in 1990 with the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA). The state legislature—under a directive from the Kentucky Supreme Court declaring the public education system unconstitutional—designed a new system, with radical reforms in finance, curriculum, and governance. While many of the governance provisions were conceived to eliminate cronyism and nepotism, the most dramatic change was to put accountability and responsibility for reform at the building level. Those most responsible and accountable, legislators reasoned, should also be making the relevant decisions.
KERA called for at least one school in every district in Kentucky to be making decisions at the local level, beginning with the 1991–92 school year. By January 1995, most or all of the schools in the commonwealth's 176 districts were doing so, bringing the total number of decentralized schools to more than 800 (Edwards 1995). Every school in Kentucky must be engaged in local decision making by July 1996.
The State Department of Education, researchers, and, of course, the local press and general public are carefully monitoring the progress of Kentucky's schools (Russo 1994). After four and a half years, Kentucky has learned some hard lessons that can benefit other schools and communities as they develop their own school-based structures. I call them the 3 Ds: democracy, discussion, and decisions.
Lessons about Democracy
Other schools can gain insights about democracy from the approach that Kentucky's legislature took to decentralize school governance and ensure representative voices on School-Based Decision-Making (SBDM) Councils. These councils—composed of the principal, three teacher representatives, and two parent representatives—are the school's primary decision-making body.
Decentralization. Although the decentralization aspects of shared school governance have been fairly successful overall, putting them in place has been slow and contentious in some areas of the state.
Under the Kentucky Education Reform Act, SBDM Councils received decision-making authority for 16 areas of school operations and policy. For example, councils select the principal, set the number and distribution of personnel assignments in the building, choose textbooks, and select instructional materials. Working from an assigned per-pupil allotment of funds from the district's budget, SBDM schools manage their own instructional finances. In some districts, schools administer all aspects of the building-level budget.
- curriculum,
- staff assignment,
- student assignment,
- school schedule,
- instructional practices,
- discipline,
- extracurricular programs, and
- alignment with state standards (Kentucky Revised Statutes 1995).
In moving to local decision making, schools have encountered a number of obstacles, from the political climate of the district to apprehension about becoming involved in more meetings, more work, and more conflict. A few schools will be eligible to opt out of local decision making by virtue of achieving success on statewide assessments of individual schools.
Representation. Representation on SBDM Councils is another aspect of democracy in which the Kentucky legislature has played a major role. While teachers elect teacher representatives to the councils, members of the largest parent organization, usually a local PTA, vote on parent delegates.
To opt for larger councils, schools need approval from the State Board of Education, but their membership must reflect the same proportions of administrators, teachers, and parents. Typically, elementary schools and most middle schools use a standard six-member council, while high schools, with their larger enrollments, find that having 12 members is more representative of their diversity.
Schools have not been successful in petitioning to diversify the positions or constituencies represented on their councils. For example, no classified personnel—school secretaries, attendance clerks, cafeteria workers, or bus drivers—or delegates from local businesses and the community have a vote on the councils. Although high schools often add students as non-voting, ex-officio council members, these members are not officially approved.
But diversity has been an issue in Kentucky's few racially mixed school areas. The commonwealth has a mere 8 percent minority population, most of whom are African Americans concentrated in the larger cities, and also a unique white minority population in the Appalachian Mountains. The earliest SBDM Councils did not reflect even this small amount of diversity.
To improve this situation, the Kentucky Legislature, during its 1994 session, mandated that any school with an 8 percent or greater minority enrollment elect a minority member to its SBDM Council, if one had not been elected in a regular election. During 1993–94, the Kentucky Department of Education reported that the majority of the councils had not had to hold special elections to seat minority members, but that parents bore the brunt of minority representation (Lindle et al. 1994).
Since 1990, the Kentucky legislature has defined democracy in school-level governance through decentralization and representation. Both processes are unevenly implemented under KERA's mandate for School-Based Decision-Making Councils. Attempts at decentralization have had mixed results, and representation is still being defined in many areas of the state. These lessons in democracy have a direct effect on the quality of council operations: the discussions.
Lessons About Discussions
SBDM Councils directly control how the substance of democracy—dialogue—is promoted, practiced, and shared. As can be expected, the more than 800 councils across Kentucky have had varying success in promoting open discussions. To explain these variations, we need to look at how the councils address what I call the 3 Rs—rituals, regulations, and rule making.
Rituals. Rituals are entwined in the culture and climate of a school and its district. In Kentucky, some schools and districts remain political enclaves dominated by political parties, religious affiliations, or influential families, where blood ties can mean the difference between employment and unemployment. The degree to which districts have been able to decentralize is directly related to the degree of influence these dominant groups wield over them. Thus, the exclusion of various constituencies (for example, community members or classified staff) from council representation severely restricts the degree of open discussion and willingness to address educational decisions.
The influence of larger community rituals on moving to local decision making are exacerbated by the more private rituals between principals and faculties. For example, sometimes the principal's job may hinge on his or her status within the familial, political, or religious pecking order of the community. Other times, a teacher or parent, or group of teachers or parents, with more status in the larger community dominates the principal, given their familial, political, or religious standing.
These dynamics are duplicated in the dynamics of discussion within School-Based Decision-Making Councils. The rituals of the community, thus, become the rituals of the council—sometimes with deleterious effects on discussion.
Regulations. Legal regulations have been the bane of many council operations. The Kentucky Department of Education has issued no less than four Kentucky Administrative Regulations (KARs) and six Program Reviews (advisory opinions on SBDM operations). Together, regulations and reviews determine council operations relating to budgets, open meetings, complaint hearings, special education services, elections for minority representatives, applications for alternative SBDM models, and assignment of staff time (Russo 1994). It is no wonder that councils spend considerable time and training on following regulations and, ultimately, on creating bylaws.
Rule making. Most SBDM Councils have spent the first year or more of operation developing their bylaws, rather than on the more important business of making school decisions. Naturally, the intricacies of the statutes, regulations, and Program Reviews are unfamiliar bureaucratic territory for most parent and teacher representatives, and for some principals.
This legalism frames and directs the councils' attention away from substantive discussion. Teachers feel stymied about making any real decisions, and parents complain that the teachers have their lawyer [usually provided by the state affiliate of the National Education Association] and the principal has his or hers [usually provided by the school board], but parents have no one to tell us what this law or that regulation means. And no one to help us to decide if the teachers' lawyer and the administration's disagree (Lindle 1992, 1994).
The net effect of these rituals, regulations, and rule making is that SBDM Councils become bogged down in ceremonial debates about the adequacy of bylaws, modifying them again and again to fit some nuance of administrivia. These speculative debates center on hypothetical situations, while neglecting issues of instruction, curriculum, or discipline. Further, the dynamics of debate ensure conflict among council members—but, again, the conflicts are superficial, not substantive educational disagreements.
Some councils have moved beyond the dubious debating stage and are attending to the third D: decisions.
Lessons About Decisions
School-Based Decision-Making Councils that are capable of making decisions of substance share three characteristics: supportive leadership, a collegial climate, and a respect for the foibles of the democratic process.
Supportive leadership. Leaders play an extremely important role in nurturing any kind of change. In the case of SBDM Councils, supportive leadership has been elusive.
Making decisions at the local level is clearly a challenge to a school's prevailing political structure. Even in sites where teachers or parents have seemed to dominate the principal in the past, decentralization has upset the status quo because other groups of teachers or parents are represented on the councils. In other locations, principals who dominated the school have often retained their control through SBDM Councils. In yet another political scenario, central office personnel, superintendents, or school boards may block council decisions. Whether or not the principal supports shared decision making, clearly the success of an endeavor hinges on whether the dominant political structure of the school, district, and community actively or subversively resists implementation.
A collegial climate. A school's political climate directly affects the establishment of an atmosphere conducive to local decision making. In providing SBDM training, the Kentucky Department of Education has tried to promote collegiality by touting a consensual decision-making process. Although an overwhelming majority of council members report using consensus to make decisions, the interpretation of “consensus” varies widely among schools.
In a recent survey of council members, several teachers and parents noted that consensus meant everyone gave in to what the principal wanted (Lindle 1992). For other councils, consensus means to “just try it out for a while” or “see if you can live with it” (Brown and Lindle 1995). Regardless of how a council defines consensus, all members need to have had a role in reaching the shared meaning.
In some cases, councils operate well not by consensus but by majority vote. Such councils understand that collegiality can mean taking turns winning as opposed to looking for a win-win solution for every issue. In other words, they are comfortable with the conflicts inherent in democracy.
Respect for the messiness of democracy. The democratic process promotes a number of incompatible values. Three commonly cited democratic values are liberty, equality, and community. Liberty and equality, although interpreted as individual rights, clearly can conflict with the value of community. For example, teachers and administrators are very familiar with the challenge of balancing the individual rights of a special education student and the rights of other students in the classroom.
The foundation of the democratic process, thus, is competition among these values. Where there is competition, there is conflict (Lindle 1994). SBDM Councils that accept the contentiousness of democracy with good humor are more likely to address real issues than councils that keep returning to their bylaws to find a less conflictual decision-making process. Misunderstanding the messiness of the democratic process distracts some councils from addressing key topics that are the quintessence of educational issues.
Democratic processes are time-consuming as well as contentious. Councils that understand the importance of listening to all constituencies on important issues are able to budget their time wisely. Not only can they identify issues to be addressed, but they can also estimate the time necessary to gather and reflect on information from various sources. Recognizing time as a resource in the democratic process, these councils make sure they inform their constituencies and the community of their time lines.
Lessons for Others
- represent their local constituencies;
- have the support of political structures within the local community, the district, and the building;
- avoid framing all their work legalistically and focus on substantive educational issues; and
- develop a decision-making process that celebrates the democratic process by accepting and planning for, rather than avoiding, conflict.
Perhaps Kentucky's lessons, learned through trial and error, may help other schools as they struggle with the complex issues of local decision making.
