team development

We had sensed for some time that something was wrong – site-based management had not been delivering the goods. We formed leadership teams; they met; we shared decision making – but teaching and learning didn't change. "Perhaps too much had been expected from simply the transfer of power," suggest Priscilla Wohlstetter and Susan Albers Mohrman, who have written an extensive study looking at the outcomes of sharing decision making in schools. The idea always was to improve education for kids; but instead what seemed to have happened in many places was that there was another meeting to attend and nothing much else was new. "Is the theory flawed? Is the current wave of decentralization just another swing of the pendulum?" ask these authors, whose study of practice looked at thirty schools in nine school districts, each of which had at least four years' experience with school-based management.

We were asking ourselves the same questions. As principals of alternative high schools in...