External organizational challenges and their impacts

External Organizational Challenges

Essentially this discussion is focused on two major issues: 1) Does decentralization improve or hinder educational goals and, 2) Is it possible, within a short span of time (2-3 years) to statistically establish whether a new program is marginally or largely effective based on administrative changes. Community members, and the press, have been highly critical of the plan for decentralization and are eager to point out the perceived weaknesses.

The Situation -- The new Superintendent for Marvin County School Districts, Dr. Burton Packard, presented and implemented a plan to decentralize authority in the school district, starting with the elementary schools and moving toward secondary schools. He had three major objectives in changing the scope of authority: 1) Each school would be more accountable because they could act more flexible; 2) Individual parent and teacher governance would improve productivity; 3) Since each school is a community in and of itself, if schools have greater fiscal autonomy they can focus resources as necessary. This leaves much of the decision making to the individual school administration and parent organization.

The Schools- Based on the above, the schools established different priorities and had different ideas about decentralization. Their three-year overall test scores are also shown for analysis:

School

Support of Packard

Focus of Budget

Score 1

Score 2

Score 3

Change Year

1 to 3

Adams

Highly Supportive

Cooperative Learning

57.3

58.2

58.3

+1

Clark

Opposes plan

Learning Outcomes to improve test scores

48.7

48.3

48.1

-.6

Lincoln

Highly Supportive

Computer Assisted Learning

59.2

60.1

61.2

+2.0

Milltown

Moderately Supportive

Unknown

55.2

55.3

55.3

+.1

Wild Creek

Moderately Supportive

Unknown

54.6

55.4

55.7

+1.1

In analyzing the three-year figures we find that there is one commonality that jumps out of the data: the one school that did not support the decentralization program is the only school whose test scores have not improved. Overall, the schools have improved by a total of 4.5 (which includes the low performer), or about 7.5% over three years. The greatest amount of improvement came from Computer Assisted Learning, but that school, Lincoln, was already the high performer.

Media and parental concerns over scores are certainly reasonable and understandable. No stakeholder wishes to see scores decline. However, some major issues revolve around some of the politics in this situation:

Three years may not be enough time to statistically validate the data or the trend; even though it appears on the surface that the decentralization plan works for most schools.

Support of the plan is essential for it to have a chance to work. The lack of cooperative judgements at Clark shows in the score decline -- clearly something is not working regarding focus of instruction.