Lone Star Governance

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/bl.30087
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Author: A. J. Crabill

6 BOARD LEADERSHIP

Lone Star Governance

by A. J. Crabill

A J. Crabill is Deputy Commissioner of Governance at the Texas Education Agency

and a former Kansas City Public Schools (KCPS) board member and board chair

from 2010 to 2014. In all his work, he has been inspired by Policy Governance® and

is now bringing his wisdom and experience to Texas and the local evolution of a

framework that has been christened “Lone Star Governance.”

Introduction

Texas is home to more than 1,200

public school systems, operating

more than 6,800 school campuses, led

by more than 300,000 teachers, serving

more than 5.3 million students. Thus the

saying: everything’s bigger in Texas.

Even beyond the sheer magnitude

of Texas, the challenge of improv-

ing student outcomes is multiplied

by the extraordinary diversity of the

state—from districts serving less than

200 students to districts serving more

than 200,000; rural, urban, and sub-

urban; from lush forests to unending

deserts; from beachfront to hill country;

politically ultraconservative to politically

ultraliberal; 0 percent English language

learners to 100 percent English lan-

guage learners; 0 percent economically

disadvantaged students to 100 percent

economically disadvantaged students;

and the list goes on and on.

In this context, there can be no

reductivist or one-size-fits-all model for

improving student outcomes either in

the classroom or in the boardroom. But

there can be a continuous improvement

framework for organizing the local vision

and values in ways that leverage the wis-

dom of communities and the guidance of

research. In Texas, we call the continuous

improvement framework for governing

teams “Lone Star Governance.”

Beginnings

The Texas legislature passed a new

law in 2015 that enacted much tougher

sanctions—such as school closure—for

low-performing schools across the

state and charged the Texas Educa-

tion Agency (TEA) with enforcing them.

Many people across the state feared

that TEA would implement the new law

irresponsibly. In response, TEA began

looking for ways to honor the law in the

manner of a scalpel rather than a shot-

gun. One solution that was favored by

groups throughout Texas when asked

was to, instead of immediately closing

low-performing schools, provide train-

ing and technical support. This support,

however, needed to be available to

everyone involved. It could not be just

another ham-fisted attempt to place all

of the blame on teachers. From these

conversations the idea of a workshop for

school boards began to emerge.

Over the course of the following sev-

eral months, TEA staff worked collabora-

tively with Texas Association of School

Boards (TASB) staff, regional Education

Service Center (ESC) staff, and many

school board members throughout the

state to test various components and

ideas. All of this culminated in the cre-

ation of a rubric—the implementation

integrity instrument—that school boards

can use to self-evaluate their own per-

formance relative to those school board

behaviors that research suggests cor-

relate with improvements in student

outcomes. This instrument rapidly

evolved into a full manual and two-day

workshop, with the first workshops tak-

ing place in November 2016.

The Lone Star Governance

Framework

The intention of Lone Star Gov-

ernance is to provide a continuous

improvement framework for governing

teams (boards in collaboration with their

superintendents) that choose and com-

mit to intensively focus on one primary

objective: improving student outcomes.

The centerpiece of the implementation

instrument is the understanding that

school system activities can be catego-

rized as inputs, outputs, and outcomes.

Inputs are resources and activities

invested in a particular program or

strategy and are usually knowable at the

beginning of a cycle—teachers, instruc-

tional materials, facilities, and budgets.

Outputs are the result of a particular set

of inputs and are usually knowable in the

midst of a cycle since they are a measure

of the implementation of the program

or strategy—formative assessments,

participation measures, and financial and

operational ratios. Outcomes are the

end results of the program or strategy

and are usually knowable at the end of

a cycle—measures of the effect on the

intended beneficiary such as graduation

rates, literacy rates, and numeracy rates.

Research suggests that school boards

that focus intensely on student out-

comes, rather than primarily on inputs

or adult outputs and adult outcomes,

create the conditions for their students

to grow faster.

Because the work of school boards

is to represent the vision and values of

their communities, the outcomes for stu-

dents are selected by the school board.

The school board then creates SMART

goals—goals that are specific, measur-

able, attainable, results focused, and

time bound—based on the outcomes

they want for students. Conveniently, the

school board refers to these end results

as Student Outcome Goals. Once the

Student Outcome Goals are selected, the

school board delegates the expert work

of drafting progress measures for each

Student Outcome Goal to the superin-

tendent (these are then called Goal Prog-

ress Measures or GPMs).

Examples of Student Outcome Goals

adopted or considered by school sys-

tems in Texas include:

•Number of high-performing

campuses will increase from 5 to X

by Z.