The Governance Core: School Boards, Superintendents, and Schools Working Together

This book examines how local education governance- school boards in collaboration with district and school leadership- could, in every district, become an exemplar of highly effective decision-making, leadership and action.

The authors believe that most trustees (board members) want to make a difference in the lives of students, and to improve the district and the system and as a whole. Their vision is of a governance system, school board and superintendent; working together as a cohesive, unified team with a common vision driven by a shared moral imperative. This is a dynamic, powerful role for school boards.

?Education cannot be expected to solve all of our social ills, but it is increasingly clear that it is the one social institution that has the potential to make a major difference for humanity in a troubled world.

While it has often been shown that districts and boards don’t have close working relationships, this book takes a different view. We go to the core, basic foundation of understanding local efficacy: the mindset of high performing trustees and superintendents carrying out the critical function of governance. We believe that school boards are vastly underutilized at precisely the time when they are most needed. We hold another fundamental premise which we will position in the course of this book: the vast majority of school board members want to improve the public education system.

Finally, decisions are made within a political context. Our main goal in this book is to spell out what good governance consists of at the local district level so that well-intended politics can combine with the governance core to produce education results never before seen.