SITE-BASED MANAGEMENT

Concern for the quality of the public school education that today's students are receiving has given rise to a mind-boggling list of concepts intended to reform our schools. The list includes a bottom-to-top reorganization of management, often referred to as school-based management (SBM).

School-based management (SBM) is a "strategy to improve education by transferring significant decision-making authority from state and district offices to individual schools" (Myers & Stonehill, 1993, p. 1). The traditional participants in the educational process, specifically, principals, teachers, students and parents, are given "greater control over the education process by giving them responsibility for decisions about the budget, personnel, and the curriculum" (Myers & Stonehill, 1993, p. 1).

School-based management owes at least part of its roots to the business concept of total quality management, which asserts that decisions made closer to the actual product will produce a better product. Translated into school district language, the quality of the educational experience provided for students will improve if a partnership comprised of teachers, parents, business leaders and school leaders is the entity that creates the decisions affecting students and schools. (Barely discussed in the early literature are the concepts of accountability and performance measurement.)

Some school districts have preferred to jump in with both

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esearcher asserts that "site-based management in most instances does not achieve its stated objectives" (Malen, as quoted in Petersen, 1991) Prior research "and the experiences of a myriad of schools makes it clear that a shift to school-based management does not guarantee subsequent school improvement" ("Generating", 1996, p. 2). Strictly speaking, "as a form of governance, SBM will not in itself generate improvement in school performanceàSBM is simply a means through which school-level decision makers can implement various reforms that can improve teaching and learning" (Wohlstetter, 1995, p. 3). The Department of Education funded an assessment of school-based management, which stated, "So far, there is scant evidence that schools get better just because decisions are made by those closer to the classroom. That deceptively simple change in how schools are managed and governed, as attractive as it is to many teachers, principals and parents, turns out to be rather meaningless unless it is part of a focused, even passionate, quest for improvement. School-based decision-making is one aspect of systemic school reform--an approach to improving schools that also includes changes in instruction and curriculum and in the i
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Approximate Word count = 2986
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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