School governance models: business-stakeholder-community

Some thoughts arising from Ranson/ Crouch :

• Aspects of the “business” model for schools are attractive: 
• Business have clear goal hierarchy usually with easily measured success outcome on top i.e. profit. 
• Schools suffer from all pervasive confusion about every aspect of their goals – e.g. who are their clients ? students? Parents? teachers? government? society? What outcomes signify success ? test scores? Student satisfaction? Etc etc 
• Businesses have powerful management structures with both that ability to quickly and innovatively respond to needs, as well as the clear and personal responsibility for the success of the business.
• School suffer paralysis and consequent resignation arising from government regulation re. industrial contracts and staffing, financial management, curriculum decisions, what brand of toilet paper they MUST buy etc…. 

• Aspects of the stakeholder model are attractive: 
• Stakeholders not only gain benefits from the organisation, but are willing to add value to it in a number of ways – 
• e.g. Apple computers has been able to co-opt users into a stakeholder culture with enormous benefits in product feedback, promotion and use innovation – as well as sales. Schools that can create this sense of “product” loyalty gain huge benefits ranging from participation in “governance”, free labour, donations during and long after direct involvement (alumni) etc. Apple does not provide much actual participatory power. Their central achievement has been to create a product that matches personal needs so well that people interpret the relationship as personal.
• Schools need to give their clients want they want before any such powerful relationship can be created.
• Formal power within the organisational structure is far less important IF the organisation continues to respond to the real needs of the clients, then the relationship WILL be personal.
• This is the central failure of most schools. They give students and parents what the school thinks they SHOULD have. They fail to sell to their own clients (often while spending more money on promoting themselves to people outside the school community). 

• Aspects of community governance model are attractive: 
• To me this model become appropriate when the organisation that we have come to know as a “school” is not delivering value for money, or indeed is becoming a counterproductive force in a community. 
• The dissemination of responsibility for education across communities; the formation of “clusters”, partnerships etc etc to me are recognitions that the forced attendance of large numbers of students at a single location at a given time is not productive within some communities. 
• In a sense it is a recognition that without high levels of parental support for the school culture and high levels of student support and compliance with their parents, such schools are ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. 
• Some propose such clustering as a benefit for all schools, but in my experience schools all approach such groups with a “cherry picking” approach and are careful to retain their autonomy as much as possible. 

• Usually these ideas fail as soon as the participants are forced to fund the activities within their own budgets i.e. they do not pass the fundamental business model test: “Is this the value for money for our funds?” 
• So to me the only effective role for a community governance model would be in reducing the attendance of students at schools and the consequent reduced resource allocation to these sites, while building up resource allocation and community supervision of the students at a range of community site. 

As usual, I want to have it all ways.

• Business model aspects that keep the goals hierarchy clear and do not keep weakening and confusing schools by making them answer to every new issue discovered by the press and then the politicians. 
• Stakeholder model that focuses on the client needs of parents, and through them, students, so that the product personally matches the client need and creates fertile grounds for relationship development through a whole range of mechanisms (of which actual governance participation is a minor component). 
• Community governance model as a partial or complete alternative to school attendance for communities (or client groups) whose social attitudes are incompatible with school attendance (i.e. resistance to coercive attendance, lack of adherence to middle class values such as politeness and physical restraint, lack of interest in anything beyond their daily cultural experience scuh as global cultural achievements in science or arts).