Board Meets to Finalize 2009-2010 Goals

The Rapid City Board of Education will meet tonight to discuss and finalize its goals for the 2009-2010 academic year. Once adopted, the goals are supposed to drive the goal-setting process for the superintendent, the administrative team and building principals so that the entire staff is focused on the same outcomes and working together. The goals are also supposed to serve as a framework for the board’s self-evaluation and the evaluation of the superintendent.

In practice, the Board’s goal-setting process rarely works as it’s supposed to. For the last four years at least, the Board has failed to adopt its goals until well into the school year — sometimes it is as late as January. Once adopted, the goals are rarely referred to again. They are not posted on the District’s website, and there is no end-of-the-year evaluation by the Board of how well the District did. The process also provides no consequences if the District and the Board fail to meet their goals.

District Improvement Plan Provides Alternative Process

In some ways, the Board’s goal setting has been replaced by the development of the District Improvement Plan. Required by the State of South Dakota under No Child Left Behind, the District Improvement Plan articulates goals for student achievement based on the annual Dakota STEP test. The plan is developed by the staff in the fall after a deep analysis of the previous year’s Dakota STEP scores. It identifies strategies for raising student scores in reading and math. The draft plan is reviewed by a committee of staff and community members and approved by the Board in January.

In reality, however, the District is already far along in its implementation of the District Improvement Plan by January. When the Dakota STEP scores first become available in late August, principals and teachers pore over the data to discern strengths and weaknesses in the educational program. Building teams then develop strategies to address areas where students seem to be struggling. The Board is generally not involved and often unaware of the results of this process until January.

Different Approaches to Board Goal Setting

Over the years, the Board of Education has wrestled with its approach to goal setting. In 2001-2002, for example, the Board’s goals were broad and progress generally unmeasurable: “expand upon past efforts and increase connections” with the community or “continue to emphasize improvements in student learning/achievement.” Sometimes, the Board’s goals have included “to do” list items. In 2003-2004, the Board resolved to “Implement the RCAS multi-year strategic plan.” In 2004-2005, the Board established a goal to “Conduct a study and develop an updated inventory of all District real estate holdings to determine present and future District needs.”

In recent years, the Board’s goals have been lifted from the District Improvement Plan, identifying specific targets for student achievement on the Dakota STEP test. By relying solely on the District Improvement Plan process to develop District goals, however, the Board tends to define success in education too narrowly, measuring student achievement only in terms of reading and math on a single high-stakes test. Moreover, the benefits of the specificity of the goals are lost because the budgeting process rarely looks at how resources will be shifted to accomplish the District’s goals. As a result, at the Board level, the goals represent little more than good intentions, and not the basis upon which to plan.

Tonight will hardly offer the opportunity for the Board to fix a process that has lost its focus, but as the Board continues to address its planning and budgeting processes, timely goal-setting should become an integral part of a more coherent process of strategic planning.

Editorial by Eric Abrahamson

Tonight’s special Board Study Session begins at 5:00 p.m. in the East Conference room on the Third Floor of the City/School Administration Center at 300 Sixth Street in Rapid City. The meeting is open to the public.