Site-Based Management Versus Systems-Based Thinking

Abstract

This case was written to help prepare building-level and central office administrators who are expected to effectively lead schools and systems in an often tumultuous world of educational accountability and reform. The intent of this case study is to allow educators to examine the impact data management has on the types of thinking required when leading school systems, particularly in larger school districts. Educators studying this case should examine the strengths and weaknesses of site-based management as well as systems-based thinking—specifically how both can play a role in how schools and school systems are led in the age of accountability and reform.

Keywords

school reform accountability site-based management systems-based thinking data-driven decisions

Case Narrative

Lincoln Public Schools (LPS) is a Midwestern public school district that supports more than 20,000 students. Located in the same suburban municipality that supports a major land-grant university, LPS has 21 elementary schools, 6 middle schools, 3 large high schools, and a career education building. Despite the fact that a third large high school was built just 2 years ago in 2012, there is such growth in Lincoln that a fourth high school is currently being planned, along with a seventh middle school and 2 additional elementary schools. This rapid growth in LPS is due to the relatively recent expansion of the city of Lincoln, which has exponentially grown in the last 15 years, increasing from a population of 82,000 to just more than 130,000. As a result, construction, corporate manufacturing investment, university enrollment, and overall municipality development are at an all-time high in Lincoln.

As LPS has continued to grow with Lincoln, so too has the diversification of the district. LPS supports a student population that is 52% White, 21% Black, 13% Hispanic, 7% Asian/Pacific Islander, 5% Multi-racial, and 2% Other. Although Black students have traditionally been the largest minority group served within the district, the recent influx in construction and manufacturing employment has resulted in a large increase in Hispanic families, causing LPS to reallocate resources to fund English Language Learner (ELL) teachers within the district. In addition, although Black and White citizens have enjoyed a long history of peaceful racial relations, an ongoing achievement gap between Black and White students has persisted over the last several decades as evidenced when state testing results are published in the local paper each August. As a result, addressing this problem has remained a continual focus for the LPS district leadership. Consequently, LPS has implemented a variety of initiatives to help address issues of inequity, including professional development for teachers that improve culturally proficient instruction, positive behavior interventions and supports (PBIS), and restorative practice to help reduce the disproportionate amount of students of color who receive discipline referrals.

The political culture of Lincoln is highly influenced by the presence of the local university. With more than half of the citizens of Lincoln possessing a bachelor’s degree, and roughly one third having obtained a graduate degree, it is 1 of the top 10 most educated municipalities per capita in the country. The level of education results in citizens being invested in local politics to ensure LPS remains a high-quality public school district; it also provides LPS with a vast selection of potential candidates to pick from when an administrative position becomes available. The district leadership in LPS has been quite diverse the past four superintendents, particularly for a Midwestern community that is surrounded by other highly conservative and traditionally White municipalities. A Black female, a Jewish male, an openly gay White female, and Black male, respectively, have provided previous leadership at the superintendent level since 1999. The newest selected superintendent, Dr. Sara Martinez, is a Hispanic female, who started her tenure in July of 2013 and was publicly endorsed by the Board of Education to help bridge the gap between the existing Lincoln population and the new influx of Hispanic families. All of these superintendents had earned a PhD or EdD in educational leadership, and had either published or taught courses at the university level prior to working at LPS.

Taking full advantage of their location in relation to the university, LPS continually implements new school reform and improvement efforts in an attempt to address ongoing issues of equity and social justice, evaluates local educational policy, and engages the community in these changes, all of which have traditionally helped the district avoid any punitive action from the State Department of Education (SDOE). A longstanding mantra of central office leadership has been to allow site-based management to determine what is needed at each site, giving control to building principals to make instructional decisions based on individualized needs. Despite the ongoing presence of the achievement gap, for the last 7 years, LPS has received “Accreditation With Distinction,” the highest award from the SDOE—and the public has come to expect it.

Building-Level Empowerment Through Site-Based Management

Nestled in the rolling hills of the college town, LPS is an attractive place to be a building-level administrator—not only due to its physical beauty but also because of how district leadership has traditionally empowered buildings to make site-based decisions to help meet the needs of the individualized populations they serve. Although the district has implemented many school improvement efforts using a top–down approach (i.e., standards-based education, assessment for learning, response to intervention, etc.), how each school sets its own schedule, uses its own budget, uses various human resources to provide instruction, supports staff with professional development, tracks attendance, and handles discipline procedures has always been established by each building-level administrative team. The thought and intent of the district-level leadership have been that principals and assistant principals need to be given autonomy to respond to the individualized needs of their school building to best meet the needs of students. In theory, principals would use their data management systems to make decisions about instructional needs for students and professional development opportunities for teachers. As a result, many of the schools in LPS have varying climates and cultures depending on the type of leadership provided by the administrative teams, the support given to teachers, and the varying demographics of students supported in each building.

Using the site-based management approach has worked well for the previous four LPS superintendents, as this style of leadership has kept building-level administrators happy, the public has remained trusting of administrative decisions, and the district has been able to continue to implement new improvement and reform efforts. However, Dr. Martinez, who came from a large school district in Arizona that was double the size of LPS, believed that this style of leadership can lead to disparities between schools when reporting core data to the SDOE. In her previous district in Arizona as an assistant superintendent, Dr. Martinez witnessed multiple audits by the Arizona Department of Education (DOE) due to how the schools within the district were reporting teachers providing instruction in courses they were not certified to teach, disproportionate discipline based on racial identification and special education classification, and ELL programs that did not meet state or federal requirements. Many of these audits resulted in corrective actions by the Arizona DOE against her previous district, causing a shift in focus to ensuring proper data reporting at the building level. Thus, Dr. Martinez was concerned not only by the reporting of the disparities to the SDOE but also by the fact that disparities can be created by operating in a loosely coupled system. When she brought this to the attention of Dr. Parsons, the superintendent who was retiring and who Dr. Martinez was replacing, Dr. Parsons stated, “That type of work is for our central office data people to worry about. In our school buildings, we want administrators to focus on being able to meet the social, emotional, and intellectual needs of our students. A word of advice, if I may? Don’t rock the boat, Sara. Our principals don’t want to deal with that type of work . . . they see that as something a secretary can do, and they want to be able to focus on the needs of their students.”

Although she thought otherwise, Dr. Martinez decided to table the issue. After all, in such an educated town, surely someone would have addressed this by now if it had been an issue.

Data-Driven Accountability and Reform

In August of 2013, the SDOE published a new version of the State School Improvement Plan (SSIP), a yearly report that compares how school districts are scored and ranked for accreditation purposes. LPS, which had always enjoyed being given the highest rank of “Accredited with Distinction,” dropped below “Highly Accredited” and was simply given a rank of “Accredited,” a full two categories below its normal ranking. Flabbergasted, Dr. Martinez read through the scoring categories in an effort to see the areas of deficiencies. The achievement gap between the Black and White students remained the same, but Black student achievement had actually fallen when analyzed using a growth model. In addition, attendance dropped dramatically, as the SDOE had implemented a new model to calculate attendance, changing from a raw percentage of total minutes present for all students to the total percentage of students present 90% of the time or more, greatly affecting average daily attendance (ADA) and thus financial reimbursement for the district. Moreover, lower than normal numbers of highly qualified teaching assignments, disproportionate special education discipline, improper use of ELL funded program, lack of dual credit reporting, and poor post-graduation placement numbers all negatively affected LPS. Dr. Martinez felt blindsided.

Determined to get to the bottom of this issue so she could begin a plan on how to respond to the local media, Dr. Martinez called an emergency meeting with her cabinet and the LPS data management team. Demanding to know what had happened with the drop in state core data reporting, a disturbing story unfolded. “We have always left the reporting to the data folks,” replied the assistant superintendent of elementary education. “It has always been their job to work with the principals to report out teacher certifications, class assignments, and student attendance.” “Right,” responded the assistant superintendent of secondary education, “principals don’t deal with reporting dual credit numbers or graduate follow up numbers. That’s something that is reported from the central office data reporting team.”

“How is that possible?” replied Dr. Martinez. “In a school system that is constantly changing, in which decisions are supposed to be based on data, how do the school leaders not have a pulse on daily attendance, or even which students are meeting or not meeting academic growth goals? How do they know which parents they should be contacting to help reduce truancy? What have we been doing with our financial projections in regard to ADA . . . have we not used this information to address attendance issues? What happens when a classroom assignment changes to a different teacher, or when dual credit is applied? Do you mean to tell me that most of this information principals don’t have a firm grasp on in their buildings?”

A silent and sheepish group stared back at Dr. Martinez. Finally, one of the core data reporting team members spoke up. “For the record, Dr. Martinez, we did share the updated protocols with how the new SSIP report would potentially impact the reporting of core data from the schools. When we shared this at the district-wide principal’s meeting, no one asked any questions about the changes. We offered trainings to help prepare people for the changes, to ensure teacher certifications, dual enrollment, and discipline were input correctly in the data management system. Out of the 31 schools, four administrators came to the training.”

Dr. Martinez looked around the table and realized LPS had a problem. As she gathered her belongs to draft a response to the media, she left the room stating, “We will have to start thinking more as a system.”

Toward a Systems-Based Approach

Immediately following the release of the SSIP report to the public, Dr. Martinez issued a statement to the Lincoln community stating there had been an issue with the LPS reporting system, that the issue was being addressed, and that the district would work to earn the “Accreditation With Distinction” label again in the near future. Immediately, Dr. Martinez implemented a systems-based approach to rethink how LPS collected, organized, and reported data to the SDOE. Using her background knowledge and experience from Arizona, and feeling she did not have the time to empower change from the ground up by providing professional development for principals to properly use their data management systems, Dr. Martinez imposed a top–down improvement approach, and worked hard with the core data reporting team and the building administrators to align systems of responses to the issues that caused the lower accreditation score. All discipline, attendance, and teacher certification data were to follow the same procedures, taking this out of the hands of building principals and placed under control of the central office as required protocols. Audits from the central office were conducted every week within these areas to ensure proper reporting, and this information was part of each principal’s score card and evaluation. The result of this approach to improvement was that principals more closely monitored attendance of students within their building, achievement growth for each student became a central focus and priority, the percent of courses taught by highly qualified teachers increased to more than 95, and discipline disparities were eliminated.

Although the public was initially outraged at the dip in accreditation score, Dr. Martinez worked hard to earn back the trust of the public, continually monitoring the work of her building-level principals to ensure data collection and management were taken seriously. By May of 2014, she had reformed the way the district thought about leadership. In her opinion, the district was too big to use a site-based management approach to leadership, especially in the age of accountability. That type of leadership might have worked when the district was smaller 15 years ago, but it had grown so fast that no one had thought to rethink how schools were being led. Core data were just too important to vary from one school building to the next. Besides, data needed to be able to be compared so that decisions and improvements could be made.

When the SDOE released the embargoed SSIP scores in July of 2014, LPS was ranked as “Highly Accredited,” missing the “Accredited With Distinction” by only a few percentage points. Excited, Dr. Martinez prepared a media announcement to celebrate the improvement made by the district. As she worked on her computer, her human resources (HR) director came in and shared with her the yearly culture survey given to principals. Behind dealing with mental health concerns of students, core data reporting was ranked as the most stressful aspect of the job of principals in LPS for the past year. In addition, the HR director shared that of the six exit interviews that she had just conducted with head principals who were resigning from the district, all of them had mentioned leaving due to a loss of ability to make site-based decisions as a result of the new systems-based approach of the central office. As Dr. Martinez sat in her seat looking out the window, she began to reflect on the past year. Had her work helped or hurt the district? What, if anything, could she have done differently to ensure LPS remained effective in the eyes of the public? How might she move forward in the upcoming year, to make sure principals felt supported at the building level?

Teaching Notes

Site-based management became increasingly popular in the educational leadership field during the mid-1990s, focusing on the decentralization of district-level decision making and transferring this power and process to the building level to better meet the needs of students, parents, and the community being served (Leithwood & Menzies, 1998; Malen, 1994). The philosophical foundation for site-based management is based on the notion that educators in school buildings, rather than leaders who are removed from school buildings due to their positions in central office buildings, are best able to identify, analyze, and adapt to the changing needs of students (Briggs & Wohlstetter, 2003). By increasing autonomy given to school leaders, site-based management is intended to empower building-level administrators to work collaboratively with their teachers to best serve their community (Glazer, 2009; Noel, Slate, Brown, & Tejeda-Delgado, 2008). As seen in this case, LPS leadership had traditionally supported the concept of site-based management as a vehicle to best serve the needs and interests of the students and parents within the Lincoln community. By providing autonomy to the building-level administrators to make decisions on how to best provide instruction, reinforce discipline procedures, and track important data used to make decisions, LPS district leadership believed they were delegating the appropriate power and decision making to the educators who best understood the needs of individual school buildings. What was ignored, however, was the need to organize and maintain critical reporting data, as well as provide necessary professional development for principals to understand how to manage their school database systems, especially as the district grew in size and as accountability and reform efforts evolved.

From a theoretical perspective, site-based management seems rational, democratic, and progressive in terms of ensuring schools can best respond to the needs of their community. However, site-based management does not have a clear, consistent definition as to what the theory looks like in action (David, 1995/1996; Meyer, 2009), and lacks empirical evidence to support the theory (Cuban, 2004; Leithwood & Menzies, 1998). As a result, site-based management might meet the changing needs of communities; however, it lacks a global perspective and might not be effective in monitoring changing demands of educational accountability (Provost, Boscardin, & Wells, 2010). With regard to the leadership displayed in LPS, site-based management likely contributed to the overall impact of producing responsive school climates and cultures for instructional needs of students; however, there was a lack of communication about how changing reporting requirements would affect the accreditation of the district. In addition, the overreliance on the theory of site-based management prevented the district from providing a balcony perspective on what was required from building-level leadership, mainly that principals need to have a firm understanding on how data management and reporting requirements can affect leadership decisions. As a result, although site-based management provided plenty of leeway to address social, emotional, and academic needs of students, it ignored the need to think systematically about how school accountability requirements must be taken into account by all levels of educational leaders.

Systems-Based Thinking

Systems-based thinking, systems thinking, or systems dynamics, all point to the need for a centralized role in evaluating how a system functions, providing feedback regarding detected changes, and evolving practices to ensure maintenance of the system. Haimes (2009) emphasizes a system’s central role is to measure performance capabilities, communicate consequences, assess vulnerability of a current system, determine the resilience vectors of a given system to survive a hostile environment, reflect on the states of a system, and clearly comprehend the risks if the system does not function at an expected level. Although a school system should be able to look for and detect patterns, many districts struggle to evolve and meet the demands of often complex and seemingly ever changing accountability systems (Grammatikopoulos, 2012). In addition, many school systems traditionally have supported learner-centered approaches; however, systems thinking approaches that can increase student learning have largely been ignored (Arndt, 2006). Prior to the arrival of Dr. Martinez, the district administration provided within LPS largely ignored a systems-based approach to leadership. Even when provided with a small core data reporting team, the district leadership of LPS was not able to assess the vulnerability, consequences, or risks of how their attention to data might negatively affect their district as a whole. Due to the overreliance on site-based management, a lack of systems-based thinking inhibited the ability for LPS leadership to keep tabs on the changing accountability requirements of the SDOE.

In using system dynamics to evaluate the relationship and impact between variables (Fredericks, Deegan, & Carman, 2008), administrators within LPS could have been prepared for, planned, and responded to changing accountability requirements. Systems concepts not only help ensure useful evaluation, but they can also clarify responsibilities and requirements within a system to ensure implementation matches given circumstances (Imam, LaGoy, & Williams, 2007). Moreover, systemic intervention can address issues of marginalization based on conflicts that may occur between groups within a system (Midgley, 2007). As seen within the LPS case, Dr. Martinez was able to apply systems-based thinking to improve the accreditation status of the school district by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of building principals in ensuring core data were correctly reported. However, she did so in a manner that isolated and marginalized a large subsection of her building principals, in some cases causing such conflict that several of the principals decided to leave for other districts. Rather than imposing a system of improvement over the principals, Dr. Martinez could have used a different form of leadership that gave power to her principals. If she had brought the issue to the building-level principals and worked in a more collaborative manner, the outcome of six of them leaving for other districts might have been different.

Database Management Systems Driving Accountability and Reform

Database management systems play a powerful role in the current education accountability and reform climate. State database systems, from a state and federal perspective, are intended to provide feedback on policy decisions, improve student outcomes, and allow state and local educational agencies to provide necessary interventions to help students remain academically successful (Council of Chief State School Officers, 2013; ICF International, 2012). Not only do these database systems track early childhood and high school graduation rates, but increasingly, there is a longitudinal focus on what data systems tell us about the success of a student at the postsecondary level (Data Quality Campaign, 2012; Knapp, Kelly-Reid, & Ginder, 2012). As state database management systems have increasingly expanded their ability to collect longitudinal data, they have also developed more sophisticated business rules to check for proper teacher certification, dropout rates, and overall effectiveness of school programs (Data Quality Campaign, 2011). In doing so, database systems have increased in complexity, requiring school leaders to think differently about the organization and collection of their own database management systems. However, research shows that principals are often diffident about data and often do not have a firm grasp on using data management systems (Wayman, Cho, Jimerson, & Spikes, 2012). With regard to the LPS case, principals within the district were given leeway with regard to how they led their schools from a site-based management approach; however, district leadership was not able to see the importance of ensuring data were entered and reported correctly. As a result, building-level leadership did not perceive the importance of managing their own data systems, which led to district leadership having to alter procedures and practices, greatly influencing the climate and culture of the district.

As policymakers continue to invest in longitudinal data systems, school districts must respond by updating various support systems to ensure data management leads to desired outcomes (Supovitz, Foley, & Mishook, 2012). In addition to state systems becoming increasingly focused on collecting data on the effectiveness of school administrators (Campbell & Gross, 2012), educational administrators must be aware of the importance of providing instructional leadership that influences the culture of how teachers perceive the effective use, and management, of data (Lange, Range, & Welsh, 2012). Although LPS had enough resources to employ several people to constitute a state data reporting team, the district still failed to adapt and evolve to create a system that valued and supported a database management system. Many districts will not have the funding to delegate these core data responsibilities; however, this work should be seen as an important aspect of leadership, particularly when accreditation is involved. Within the culture of LPS itself, there should not be a shift in focus regarding the importance of being able to respond the individual needs of building populations. Rather, there should be a collaborative approach to ensuring principals understand their responsibility to correctly collect and manage their school database system.

Discussion Questions and Teaching Activities

Instructors should use this case study and teaching notes to delve into the various leadership theories and how they might inform leadership in the age of accountability and reform. Although it is important to acknowledge that systems-based approaches to school leadership can help principals and superintendents navigate treacherous accountability measures, it is equally important to support site-based management of individual schools to respond to the well-being of students and teachers. The following discussion questions and teaching activities are intended to allow educational leadership students to critically explore how various leadership theories are affected by policy implementation in high-stakes accountability settings. Aspiring leaders, theorists, researchers, and policymakers can use this case to deeply analyze the need to balance site-based leadership with a centralized approach to ensure accountability and reform policies are communicated and understood at the practitioner level.

Discussion Questions

What are the strengths and weaknesses of school principals being allowed to lead with a site-based management approach? What must district leaders provide to help principals be better prepared to collect and maintain data in their data management system (Wayman et al., 2012) and still make autonomous decisions based on the needs of students, parents, and the community being served (Leithwood & Menzies, 1998; Malen, 1994)? Considering the case detailed in LPS, how might school and district leaders work together more effectively to balance the needs of reporting and data management requirements to be able to focus more on the instructional needs of students and teachers? What might LPS do moving forward to strike a balance between these two requirements of leadership?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of district leadership requiring school principals to lead with a systems-based approach? How might school principals respond to this leadership approach and work collaboratively so they do not feel marginalized within the system (Midgley, 2007) and still meet the needs of their individual buildings? With regard to the LPS case, how might the disposition toward data management by principals, the lack of oversight provided by central office administrators, and the response (or lack thereof) to changing accountability measures provide lessons that could inform other principals and district administrators?

How might school and district leaders find a balance between site-based management and a systems-based approach? What could Dr. Martinez have done differently to ensure LPS adapted to managing data moving forward while maintaining buy-in with her principals?

What pressures, real or imagined, do school leaders face regarding the perception of accountability data with tax payers and stakeholders? How do responses to accountability systems negatively affect decisions at the instructional level? Given the changing demographics of Lincoln, what issues of equity does a school district such as LPS have to address in the reporting of data?

Analyze how data management systems have altered the way that practitioners, researchers, and policymakers think about, and respond to, accountability and reform efforts programs (Data Quality Campaign, 2011). How might these data be used to better inform practice and theory, and create better policy? With regard to the LPS case, what are the major lessons learned from this history and actions of the district?

Teaching Activities

The impact of a data-driven accountability and reform

Instructors should place students into small groups and ask students to discuss the impact data-driven reform has on leadership within school systems. Specifically, the conversation should focus on how to strike a balance between site-based management and systems-based thinking. Students should then draft a district policy on how data management requirements could better inform teachers, students, and parents on a monthly basis regarding the progress of individual schools.

Approaches to thinking about leadership

Students should explore the impact of site-based and systems-based thinking on school leadership by conducting a cross-class debate regarding the impact on how these two approaches to thinking influence responses to accountability and reform mandates at the district and building levels. The class should be split into two groups, and instructors should ask one side to argue in favor of site-based thinking and the other side to debate in favor of systems-based thinking. The focus of the debate should help students to consider how much autonomy principals should be given to respond to the needs of their students, in light of the consequences of high-stakes accountability measures.

Exploring database management systems

As partners or individually, students should investigate a local school district (either their own or one close by) to see how their database management system is maintained for reporting purposes. Students should examine and explore what aspects of autonomy are given to building-level principals and what requirements district administrators see as non-negotiable. In investigating the database management systems, students should critically analyze what data are used solely for state data reporting purposes, what data are seen as valuable with regard to improving teacher instruction, and what data might be seen as valuable to the community. Once the investigation is complete, students should share out their findings with a brief presentation. Instructors should help facilitate the discussion by addressing how data management systems might be improved to help drive issues of social change and instructional improvement.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author Biographies

Ian M. Mette is a visiting assistant professor in the Educational Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas. His research interests include school reform policy, teacher supervision and evaluation, and bridging the gap between research and practice to inform and support school improvement efforts. Specifically, his work targets how educators, researchers, and policy makers can better inform one other to drive school improvement and reform policy.

Ed Bengtson is an assistant professor in the Educational Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas. His research interests focus on the socialization of educators and the educational doctorate as a professional degree. Dr. Bengtson’s teaching areas include qualitative research methods, program evaluation, and educational leadership courses.

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