The Hard and Critical Work of School Board Governance

• Published date: 01 July 2018
• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/bl.30110
• Author: Cindy Elsbernd

4 BOARD LEADERSHIP

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(continued from front page) The Hard and Critical Work

of School Board Governance

By Cindy Elsbernd

Cindy Elsbernd is the vice chair of the Des Moines Public Schools board of

directors in Des Moines, Iowa; a member of the second cohort of the IPGA Policy

Governance Prociency Program; founder and director of Iowa Kidstrong Inc.;

the program manager for the United Way of Central Iowa’s Well Kids Coalition;

and an independent contractor with the Iowa Association of School Boards’

Board Development Cadre. In this article, she discusses the application of Policy

Governance principles in a school board setting.

I

have served on the Des Moines

Public Schools board of directors for

a little over six-and-a-half years now.

I’ve been a governing board member

for about four of those. A perpetual

process of reflection tells me that in

those early years, I neither knew what

it was I was supposed to be doing,

nor did I understand the gravity of my

ignorance. I certainly wasn’t (and still

am not) a bad person, nor did I have ill

intent. I, like many, many others who

find themselves sitting on a publicly

elected school board, simply didn’t

know what the job was. I thought

there was something else I was sup-

posed to be doing—serving as a man-

agement advisory or coming up with

the next great breakthrough school

reform idea (because, hey, I had kids

in the system and had also started and

managed a small but successful non-

profit to support youth and liked to

think of myself as a creative problem-

solver). Maybe it was even a little bit

about thinking my role was to provide

servant leadership on what might

equate to the most important and

powerful of PTAs. Now—and I’m still

not claiming to be perfect or to not

have moments of regression—through

development; experience; and a lot

of reading, listening, and learning, I

understand how even the best intent

when focused in the wrong places

can be damaging to achievement of

the organizational mission and, more

pointedly, harmful to students.

Seeing the Big Picture

Perhaps you have an even better

and more seasoned vantage point

than I do to see the big picture in

school board governance. If not, let’s

take a look together at where boards

of education (and sometimes super-

intendents too) get stuck, how that

is harmful, and how a framework of

principled governance that includes

a robust monitoring plan and process

affords boards the ability to direct

management’s job and rigorously

evaluate its accomplishment without

interfering. This in turn allows boards

to be focused on the bigger picture

and do the critical work of visioning for

the future in account to their organiza-

tional ownership and for the benefit of

the students they are trusted to serve.

I sometimes feel that what seems

like the no-brainer stuff is often the

hardest. Or maybe it’s just the least

fun. Or both. Regardless, school

boards should take a significant

amount of time to decide what it is

they exist to do, how they are going

to interact with each other and get

their work done, how they are going

to interact with their superintendent

and delegate the authority bestowed

upon them by those to which they are

accountable, and how they are going

to ensure the mission and organiza-

tional goals are accomplished in a

prudent, ethical, and effective manner.

Using Policy Governance® principles,

this translates to determining orga-

nizational ends, the governance pro-

cess, delegation to management, and

management limitations. This requires

a lot of dialogue, value for and con-

sideration of diverse perspectives,

and discipline … in perpetuity. It’s not

a one-and-done scenario or a “check

it off the list and call it good” thing.

That’s because context changes over

time, values change over time relation-

ally with context, things advance, and

things regress, and, therefore, the agil-

ity to respond becomes increasingly

important. But what cannot be lost

here is that the response needs to be

intentional and done explicitly through

policy—write it down and then expect

it and only it (because someone—the

ownership—expects it of you) until

there comes a point where feed-

back tells you something different or

new needs to be written down and

expected. In the meantime, boards

and board members need to stay

in their lane while it’s being worked

out by the expert hired by the board

and trusted to hire other experts,

and so on, and so on throughout the

organization.

Purposeful Monitoring

But if we don’t insert ourselves in

the mix, where it’s all happening, how

will we know? Boards know because

they monitor. Easy enough, right?

Apparently not though, because it

often either doesn’t happen or is mis-

taken for receipt of piles and piles of

data and information that may or may

not be accompanied by discussion that

is not focused toward specified and

meaningful indicators or is so hyper-

focused and localized to actually be

nothing about outcomes achievement,

tending more toward a means and/or

program and/or people focus. Various

forms of data sifting and hyper-focus

may be critical to management deci-

sions, but not so much to the gover-

nance job—specifically to the type of

performance monitoring that requires

looking in the rearview mirror and

understanding the trends exhibited

and their meaning in having made

Thinking of publishing in

Board Leadership?

Contact Samara Kuehne

for criteria at

skuehne@wiley.com