Karen Beaton was teaching 4th grade when the Edmonton Public Schools in Alberta, Canada, implemented site-based management. "It was quite exciting for everyone to be able to make decisions," she recalls. "For the first time in my career, I was able to select the books I would use in my classroom."
Beaton, now a principal at Abbot School in Edmonton, is still passionate about the philosophy that undergirds site-based management. She is, she says, an equal with the teachers in her school, and no decision about how money should be spent is made without teacher input. "In our schools we talk freely about what should and shouldn't be done," Beaton says. "Any principal who doesn't operate in that way wouldn't last—we wouldn't allow it."
So firmly committed are teachers and administrators to this management structure that other school districts in Canada and around the world are taking notice. Indeed, as teachers in the United States vie for the authority to make decisions that affect their schools and classrooms, educators are turning to Edmonton for guidance. In May, a group of school administrators, union leaders, policymakers, community leaders, and parents, affiliated with the Cross City Campaign for Urban Reform, spent two days in Edmonton to get a firsthand look at site-based management in practice.
"I wanted to learn what processes they used to empower their staff. I wanted to know what kind of culture needs to be in place to support site-based management and how the role of the principal becomes redefined," says Molly Carroll, assistant director of the Quest Center, a branch of the Chicago Teachers Union primarily devoted to education reform. Carroll, a "devotee" of total quality management, is interested in seeing teachers in her district become as empowered as those in Edmonton. She discovered during her visit that one key to realizing that goal is trust. "It's something I heard time and time again: We have to trust.' It's not easily achieved, it's not quickly achieved, but trust is the basis of everything."
Kenneth Marshall, president of Edmonton Public Teachers, the professional association that represents all teachers in the district, agrees with Carroll's assessment. "Everyone has to trust in the morality of everyone else," he asserts. "I have to trust that my principal is not going to jerk me around, and he has to trust that I'm best representing him and all teachers. Collegiality of teachers and principals in essential."
It helps, says Carroll, that teachers and principals in Edmonton have belonged to the same professional organization since 1918. "That certainly makes for collaboration," she observes.
It also helps that labor-management relations in Canada have never been as contentious as those in the United States, adds Dale Armstrong, director of Edmonton's monitoring and planning department. "We don't have the same social history." Edmonton's last teacher strike was in 1978 and lasted 11 days; the relatively peaceful existence between teachers and administrators has made change easier, Armstrong claims. "Our association, all along, has been collaborative. As a principal, I could call a meeting and not worry about breaking contractual agreements."
"Our collective agreement is very different" from those in the United States, agrees Bruce McIntosh, department head of central operations, monitoring, and planning. "We don't spend a lot of time arguing over clauses in the contract. We aren't constrained by our collective agreement."
Neither are teachers constrained, McIntosh adds, by a multitude of rules "laid on" by the province. McIntosh believes it would just not be fair to hold teachers and schools accountable for student achievement, and then determine the processes they'll follow to get the expected results. "People in schools can make high-quality decisions that pay off for students," he maintains. "Teachers don't have to have things nailed down in an agreement because they control working conditions at the building level." McIntosh says he's seen districts with so many constraints on teachers that "you don't give anyone any elbow room to make real decisions."
And, if survey results are any indication, the majority of teachers in Edmonton like making real decisions. In an annual survey of all staff, released in December 1995, 76 percent of the 6,500 school staff who responded said they were satisfied with the opportunity for involvement in the budget-planning process, a 5-percent increase over the year before. Seventy percent said they felt they had a say over schoolwide decisions, an increase of 4 percent from 1994. Teachers are so satisfied, in fact, that even to suggest a return to a more centralized system provokes a heated response. "Edmonton has been this way for 16 years, and many teachers don't know any other way," explains Beaton. "If anyone tried to take it away from us, there would be a problem." Beaton says giving teachers decisionmaking authority is not included in their collective agreement now, "but we would fight to have that right if need be."
Certainly parents and community members applaud the results of having implemented site-based management. Ninety-four percent of parents surveyed last December said they were satisfied with Edmonton Public Schools, and 73 percent of the community members surveyed were satisfied with the overall quality of education students in Edmonton receive.
According to Carroll, these survey results reflect the commitment of the district and the teachers' association to work together to create a positive impression of the Edmonton Public Schools. "In Edmonton, they're very concerned about perception," says Carroll. Teachers she talked with said they wanted the general population to believe that their public schools are good. "So I started asking in shops and taxis, What do you think of your schools?' and invariably, the answer would be, Oh, they're pretty good.'" Though not a scientific survey, the overwhelming consensus that the public schools are doing a good job impressed Carroll, who now attests to the claim that "people in Edmonton are extremely proud of their schools."
"We're trying to present a unified front," says Beaton, who is the immediate past president of Edmonton Public Teachers. "We bargain privately and don't do any haggling in public. Essentially, we try to eliminate the Teachers Near Strike' headlines. That's just the media trying to inflame the situation." The public, Beaton claims, doesn't need a play-by-play account of negotiations, but "they do have a right to know how we're working together for their kids."
Presenting a united front is not difficult, says Marshall, when administrators and teachers know "that we're all on the same side." Administrators and teachers alike, he maintains, "want to get on with the business of best preparing kids for their futures. Anything that gets in the way of that shouldn't happen."
Why the Move to SBM?S
Why the Move to SBM?S
Edmonton Public Schools implemented site-based management districtwide in 1979, after seven schools completed a successful pilot of the program. "Our superintendent at the time felt it didn't make much sense for someone at the central level to make decisions for all the schools," explains Dale Armstrong. He recalls that, under the highly centralized system, some of the rules made no sense. "Schools, for example, would receive five globes each year whether they needed them or not." It was therefore decided, Armstrong says, to "put the funds in schools where decisions had to be made" and to give schools the responsibility and authority to determine how those funds would be spent.