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 feet, adopting a sink or swim attitude toward the process; others began with something as small as an advisory council; but "most begin restructuring by developing a project or projects. Examples include new governance models, block scheduling, integrated curriculum, or technology labs" (Conley, 1992, p. 1). If they are to have any hope of succeeding, they must understand that "restructuring requires a systems perspectiveàrestructuring is rarely accomplished through a series of disconnected projects, no matter how innovative" (Conley, 1992, p. 1).
Earlier literature (Wohlstetter & Briggs, 1994; Wohlstetter, Smyer, & Mohrman, 1994; Robertson & Briggs, 1993; Wohlstetter & Mohrman, 1993) was often more concerned with the politics of restructuring than the how-to. In the new and improved fir...