The Board-Savvy Superintendent

Book excerpt: The Board-Savvy Superintendent's hard-hitting, no-nonsense, advice on school board leadership capitalizes on Houston and Eadie's hands-on experience working with hundreds of boards and superintendents over the past quarter-century. It is a practical, survive-and-thrive book that will help school district leaders—board members, superintendents, and senior administrators—learn to work together successfully in leading their districts in these extraordinarily challenging times. Filled with detailed, thoroughly tested guidance on how to acquire the skills and knowledge that make up board savvyness, it also addresses how to develop the school board's capacity to produce truly high-impact governance, and how to build a strong, enduring, productive board-superintendent working partnership. The authors take a fresh look at the process of governing, going well beyond the old-fashioned, control-focused "policy governance" approach. Rather than being preoccupied with developing a static structure of policies to distinguish the board's role from the superintendent's, the book describes how the board and superintendent can creatively work together in making decisions about such critical governing "products" as values, vision, mission, and strategic change initiatives. School district leaders will appreciate The Board-Savvy Superintendent's close look at the "gold standard" for board involvement in school affairs: leading strategic change. The authors go well beyond the conventional long-range planning approach of merely projecting everything a school district is doing for some arbitrary period of 3 or 5 years, which has generated tons of paper and little important change to provide the reader with detailed, practical guidance on engaging school boards creatively and proactively in a much more selective, vision-driven process that actually results in the implementation of strategic change: the Strategic Change Portfolio.