Applying to the education policy PhD program at SLU was a little bit stressful. Okay, it was a lot stressful. May 2020 was maybe not the best time to make major life decisions. Aside from the pandemic-induced stress, I was worried that my professional trajectory wouldn’t fit the mold of their preferred student. I had been working part-time as a tutor for eight years after leaving the high school classroom to raise my little kids. My masters program ended five years prior to that. So, the only recent experience I had that could demonstrate my commitment to education and my capabilities was my time on the SLPS school board.
People have a lot of misconceptions about what school board service is like and that’s especially true when it comes to large urban districts. I needed to capture all of my skills, expertise, and knowledge in the resume required for my application package, but that turned out to be harder than I initially thought.
It wasn’t just “Ugh, how can I write this in a resume-appropriate way with all those stupid action verbs?” I felt real despair. I had no idea where to start, no idea how to articulate what I’d been doing for the past three years because it simultaneously felt like everything and nothing. I’d write words only to delete them immediately. Any attempt sounded so stupid and so inconsequential. How do you take a job so enormous and capture its essence in just a few sentences? And how do you translate it into something people without the same experience can understand?
I called a friend and mentor who lowered the panic level a few notches and, then, helped me start pulling ideas together. Here’s what I ended up with:
President
Board of Education of the City of St. Louis (St. Louis Public Schools), St. Louis, MO
Chaired over 60 board meetings to ensure order, efficiency, and effectiveness. Guided board communications to navigate conflict and align discussion and deliberation to district strategic plans, data, mission, and vision. Coordinated the transition from the Special Administrative Board to an elected school board by selecting and planning professional development, creating, monitoring, and revising procedures and protocols, and facilitating meetings with stakeholders and partners. Collaborated with the district’s legal team to guarantee legal and ethical operation of the board and district. Consulted with the superintendent on a weekly basis to prioritize critical district issues requiring board involvement, plan the meeting agenda, and direct district strategy.
It got the job done; I was admitted to the program. But, I hated it then and, even though it’s still pretty much verbatim on my current CV, I hate it now. Not because it isn’t accurate, it absolutely is, but it feels so inadequate, so emotionless, and so far from the all-consuming responsibility I carried for almost three years.
I’ve been writing and rewriting this job description in the back of my brain ever since. And now, almost five years and an almost-completed PhD later, I still haven’t done it to my satisfaction. Maybe I never will. But I will keep trying.
I write about school boards a lot. Not just here, but in national publications too. I’ve written about why school board members should be paid and how to develop strong board-superintendent relationships. I’m trying to change the conversation around school boards because, as I’ve come to realize, no one else really knows how to define what they do either.
My program requires the completion of comprehensive exams, two ~25 page papers intended for a scholarly audience written in the span of eight weeks. One of mine was about the policy making role of school board members. I read through a tall stack of popular school board professional development books yet none accurately and entirely captured the responsibilities of a school board member.
Instead, the authors provided vague descriptions of the role, saying board members…
…are responsible for school district governance, a vast set of responsibilities that create “a process where the direction of the organization is set, the structure is established, and the accountability both fiscal and programmatic is assured”.1
Or,
…develop policy for the district, hire and evaluate the superintendent, monitor progress towards district goals, approve and oversee the budget, and advocate on behalf of the community at higher levels of government with the ultimate goal of producing high quality, equitable outcomes for students.2
The second one, while more specific than the first option, still lacks detail. What does it actually mean to monitor, to oversee, to advocate? How does a school board member do those things? And, better yet, how do they know if they’re doing them well?
Here’s another take.
School board members do not teach the curriculum, hire any employees other than the superintendent, or purchase materials. Instead, they make “policy, personnel, and budgetary decisions [to] control the conditions that support successful teaching and learning throughout the system”.3
Okay, so school board members make decisions. Super helpful.
The one commonality is that the responsibilities of a school board member are separate from the day-to-day operations of the district. This means that school board members have “one of the most difficult jobs in public education [because] they provide governance oversight for everything within the organization, yet they manage nothing”.4
Great. School board members are responsible for everything, yet they can’t actually do anything.
I turned page after page in one book after another, my frustration growing. I finally scribbled “What the F do school board members actually do?” on a sticky note, slapped it up on the window over my desk, and wrote this paragraph into the conclusion of that paper:
“Local school boards have long been a part of the American democratic structure of government, yet their work is remarkably difficult to define. Few of the sources, if any, cited for this paper succinctly identify what school board members do and how they do it. It is clear that school boards exist to fulfill the educational mission of the school district, but very little is known about how that is accomplished. What does it say about us as citizens that public schools feature so prominently in our daily lives yet their governance remains an afterthought, or worse, a mystery we don’t feel compelled to solve.”
Perhaps that is all we really need to know to understand how the situation in SLPS got so bad so fast. For most school districts the lack of role clarity may not ever become an issue. But here, in SLPS, a district whose school board has struggled with their governance role for decades….well, we just don’t have the institutional knowledge to smooth out those inconsistencies before they multiply. Factor in a first-time superintendent learning a brand new city and the lack of an experienced cabinet (or any cabinet at all) and it’s easy see where things went awry. Plus, its nearly impossible for the public to hold the school board accountable for a set of responsibilities that are ill-defined or maybe even impossible to define.
I wish I had it all figured out, a perfectly crafted list of school board member responsibilities, an eloquent statement of the role, but I don’t. It feels hypocritical of me to write this commentary about how problematic it is that it doesn’t exist and end without providing it. That’s not generally how I approach this work. Usually, if I’m complaining I’m also trying to sell you on solutions. Not this time.
But to wait until I have it all figured out feels disingenuous, too. School board elections are approaching and I want our conversations around that race and its importance to be rooted in something real. I’ll keep working on figuring it out if you’ll keep following along with my attempts. Maybe working it out in public will provide the accountability I need to see it through.
Campbell, D. & Fullan, M. (2019). The Governance Core: School Boards, Superintendents, and Schools Working Together. Corwin. (p. 15).
Smoley, E. R. (1999). Effective School Boards: Strategies for Improving Board Performance. Josey-Bass Publishers.
Alsbury, T. L. & Gore, P. (2015). Improving School Board Effectiveness: A Balanced Governance Approach. Harvard Education Press. (p. 15).
Balch, B. V. & Adamson, M.T. (2018). Building Great School Board-Superintendent Teams: A Systematic Approach to Balancing Roles and Responsibilities. Solution Tree Press. (p. 18).