Site-Based Management

Site-based management, or school-based decision making (SBDM), as it is more commonly known, is an innovative reform that swept the nation during the 1990s in an attempt to allow building level decision making for curricular and other educational issues. SBDM was designed to improve student learning by reducing districtwide bureaucracies while creating opportunities for shared decision making by educators, parents, and community members. This entry focuses on key legal dimensions of SBDM.

SBDM is a novel governance structure, with various permutations, that has been adopted in at least 40 states, whether jurisdiction-wide as in Kentucky, home to the most extensive statute, or on the local level as in Chicago, Illinois.

The move to local control, a precursor to what is now known as SBDM, began in New York City and Detroit in the mid-1960s. Although other school boards, most notably in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, considered similar initiatives, their efforts failed to get beyond the planning stage.

In New York City and Detroit, the then-largest and fifth-largest school systems in the United States, educational and political leaders turned to local control due to growing dissatisfaction with desegregation efforts more than a decade after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Beginning in 1969, New York City's decentralization experiment afforded local school boards power over budgets, curricula, and personnel in elementary and junior high schools; high schools remained under the control of the central board. This reform, which remains in place, has long had mixed success but was able to break the city's massive centralized educational bureaucracy into 31, now 32, local community school districts.

Detroit decentralized into eight regional districts in 1971, granting local boards power over curricula, financing, staffing, and students. The central office retained power to coordinate personnel and other services.

About 20 years after New York City and Detroit decentralized their schools, proponents of educational change turned to SBDM, an initiative that began in Australia and England at least a decade earlier. The remainder of this entry focuses [Page 829]on developments in the two most noteworthy initiatives, one that was local in nature, in Chicago, Illinois, and another that was jurisdiction-wide, in Kentucky.

Based on how poorly the city's public schools were performing, the Illinois General Assembly enacted the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988. The statute's goal was to improve student achievement, hoping to make it comparable with national norms within 5 years. The Act called for the creation of Local School Councils (LSCs), consisting of a principal and 10 elected representatives who serve 2-year terms. Two of the 10 representatives must be teachers who perform most of their duties at the same school, six must be parents of children in the school, and two must be residents of the community that the school serves. LSCs at high schools include nonvoting student members on one-year terms.

The most significant governance power of LSCs is to select principals to serve 4-year terms, to fill vacancies, to decide whether to renew principals' contracts, and to develop job-related performance criteria. Among their other duties, LSCs can approve school improvement plans; make recommendations or offer advice to principals over textbook selection, curricular issues, staff, and policies such as discipline. The results in Chicago are mixed on improving student achievement.

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