Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia
[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]
What people want always exceeds the available resources. That’s true in all aspects of life. There isn’t enough truth, justice, equity, or education to meet the demand – even in affluent societies. That’s why we have boards of school trustees. It is the responsibility of boards of school trustees to decide what the district can support among things that people want.
I wrote last year about the gloomy outlook for school board budgets. The COVID fiscal recovery and an aging population make it unlikely that the school board budgets available will make it easier to provide for the many things people want from their schools. In that blog I said that school boards with sound strategic plans have an advantage in making such decisions. Strategic plans provide a framework for determining the priorities that a board has for its budget.
The boards with strategic plans that included an assessment of risks, such as changes in funding, are in a better position than boards that have not assessed what could go wrong in pursuing their strategic plans. And in a much better place than boards without strategic plans.
Boards that evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of their programs are in an even better position to manage and deploy the resources at their disposal. Knowing whether programs achieve the outcomes called for in the strategic plan (effectiveness) is pivotally important. It is also important to know whether effective programs are having maximum effect per dollars spent (efficiency).
Very few boards are attentive to effectiveness and efficiency. The ones that are realize that school districts are a business with a unique mission. The concepts of effectiveness, efficiency, and economy (acquiring needed resources at the lowest cost with due regard for effectiveness) apply to school districts as they do to any business. The complexity of the educational business makes evaluation more challenging than even the most complex multi-national corporate entities, but an important – though too often overlooked – activity.
Strategic plans and program evaluation afford advantages to boards that have and use them. They can determine the cost-per-student of effective programs of choice, schools, and different approaches to instruction. Few boards calculate such costs regularly, some calculate cost-per-student episodically, and many do not calculate them at all.
If
you have read this far, I am guessing you can figure out which school boards
think the sky is falling and which boards can manage with the resources
available to them.