Site Based Management That Fails

Site based management can and sometimes does fail.
When it does fail, the urge is to blame the site based management, and site based "managers".

In fact, if site based management has failed at any school in the APS, it is because the administration above the site based managers has failed.

Just because a school's management is site based,
doesn't mean that the leadership of the district can simply
wash their hands of their responsibility to oversee the public
interests in the public schools.

If a site based management team is "failing",
it is the responsibility of a site based administrator to
call attention to the problem and enable its repair.

Instead, one of two things happened;
the site administrator simply called off the process,
or sat back and allowed the dysfunction to continue,
destroying the legitimacy of the effort itself.

The leadership of the APS allowed well meaning and
otherwise qualified decision makers to fall into any one of
a number of pitfalls that could have been easily avoided,
if the ultimate success of site based decision making had
ever been the actual goal of the leadership of the APS.

In the APS, despite the fact that APS teachers bring some
70,000 years of teaching experience to the table,
site based decision making was a long hard fight.
The good ol' boys that run the system were, and are,
reticent to share their power.

The good ol' boys did everything they could to clandestinely
obfuscate the process. As but one example;
consider a school where a number of stakeholders have
gathered to make a decision.

Likely as not, there is not a single one of them who is trained
in facilitating a discussion, or in any of the other concrete skills
necessary to develop and hone consensus.

They were doomed from the start.
They routinely dissolved, unnecessarily, into interpersonal
squabbles and turf wars.

APS never had any intention of letting any stakeholder
group overrule a site based administrator.
Although participants were led to believe that they were
making decisions, they were allowed to make only certain
decisions.

When push came to shove, the final decision was always
the prerogative of the principal, who was always backed by
the central office when s/he usurped the decision making
power from a site based group.

Former APS Administrator and Human Resources "expert"
Michael Houser was asked straight out, how a dispute over
who owns a particular decision would be made.
He said; "There is a reason that principals are given the master keys to a school".

Site based management makes sense. But it has to receive
unqualified support from the leadership.
It never has, and there in lies the rub, and the failure of
site based management at sites where it has indeed, failed.