“Student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change,” said Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s ... [+]
As thousands of public-school districts begin planning for the new school year in the fall, their efforts to claw back the learning losses of K12 students from the pandemic focus on improving teaching and school administration and on resource distribution to those most in need. The people who sign off on a school district’s decisions are its school board members. But many school board members are not prepared to guide their school district during this unprecedented time.
Comprised of community members typically elected to their posts, school boards set budgets, establish school boundaries and lay out school policies in any given district. They also have a more direct impact on student success — they choose curriculum, hire the superintendent and make decisions about how the district will invest in academic programming. Students and families benefit from boards that make sound, data-informed decisions. The converse is true as well – students and families lose out when the local school board is not effective.
The problem is that while it might take years to become a teacher and meet all the required bureaucratic wickets in any given state, no training is necessarily required to sit on a school board, other than learning how to win an election. Once on a school board, the training necessary to forge an effective team with other school board members for the benefit of students can be spotty to negligible.
Using Covid recovery funds provided by the federal government, North Dakota has embarked on an effort to train its school boards to be much more effective, a blueprint that could benefit other states. The state is offering to school board members an intensive two-day training called the “Be Legendary School Board Leadership Institute.”
At the training, school board members are taught that when they assume their positions back home, they must focus principally on boosting student outcomes. That may sound obvious, but many school board members regardless of geography are focused on other issues, from advancing their political careers to the culture wars that have flared at school board meetings.
Modeled after the Texas Lone Star Governance initiative, the 40-plus page training manual for North Dakota school board members lays out the suggested approach to their jobs:
“This document … includes a standard frame of reference for school board members. It offers guidance for setting academic achievement goals and monitoring progress toward those goals, and it has suggestions on how boards should spend their time. It underscores the importance of focusing all board work and effort with the sole purpose of achieving student growth and progress.”
North Dakota, under the leadership of State Superintendent Kirsten Baesler, is choosing to focus on ... [+]
The North Dakota school board training manual is noteworthy for its use of plain language, its lack of edu-jargon that often obscures meaning and accountability and its singular commitment to student achievement.
School board members are pressed to adopt three of ten big picture education outcome goals the state has set for North Dakota students. They range from committing to increasing the proficiency of students in math and reading by a specific amount over a specific period, to closing the achievement gap with underserved children by a specific amount over a specific period. School board members are advised to develop an easy-to-understand monitoring report to track progress toward those student achievement goals and by which school leaders can be held accountable.
The training is not a “one and done” event. The state provides ongoing coaching and training after the school board members go home and implement what they have learned.
North Dakota is choosing to focus on its school boards to provide added heft to pandemic recovery given recent reports showing a slide in achievement. One example shows only 39 percent of the state’s third graders reading and writing proficiently and above. Like most states, the percent of students reading and writing proficiently and above on the North Dakota assessment has trended downward since 2019.
Ordinarily school budgets are smaller than the perceived need and strained against competing priorities, so we don’t often see investments like these, focused on the adults who make the overall system function. The use of pandemic recovery funds presents a unique opportunity though to test a theory.
“Student outcomes don't change until adult behaviors change,” said Kirsten Baesler, North Dakota’s superintendent of public instruction, about the need to refocus school boards on what matters most. “School boards must adopt student outcome goals and monitor results to improve student outcomes across North Dakota.”
It’s a simple and clear approach that could help guide other states.
