m, the traditional power roles of administrators and district players would have to change if site-based management was to be effective, or so went the argument. Roles reflect values, particularly the roles assigned to principals, teachers, and parents, and those roles would have to change.
No longer could the district be the rainmaker or issue fiats, mandating ALL the rules, policies and budget decisions. No longer could be the principal be the senior partner in the firm, possessing all district-level knowledge and final veto power. No longer could teachers be merely deliveryboys and deliverygirls, stocking children's minds with society's idea of necessary information, and always at the beck-and-call of the principal. And most certainly, and perhaps most importantly, no longer could parents/guardians be simply the adults the principal called when all else had failed with their child.
The first decade of SBM implementation has come to a close and the reality is that SBM imposes a greater degree of change on the principal than anyone else in the system (Myers & Stonehill, 1993, p.2). (On the other hand, it could be argued that asking parents to accept greater responsibility for the operations of the school and insisting that teachers donate extra hours of committee service in addition to their usual class time, constitutes more than enough stress to go around.)
Principals are no longer as free as they once were to do as they please: "Principals viewed the effects of restructuring on themselves almost exclusively in terms of power. They forecast new roles with fewer decisions to make by themselves leading to a loss of control and power" (Hallinger, as quoted in Conley, 1992).
Promoters of SBM hope that, given enough time, resistant principals will discover what many of their peers have already recognized, namely, that it is imperative to redefine their role as that of a facilitator. A principal's ability to "transi...