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Redesigning the “Central Office”
VUE Number 22, Winter 2009
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Toward a “Relationship-Based Industry”: Connecting Central Offices and Communities
By Mary HarrisonMary Sylvia Harrison is vice president of programs at the Nellie Mae Education Foundation.
> Author biography
Engaging parents and the community effectively requires more proactive efforts by district central office leaders.
For fourteen years, Mary Sylvia Harrison served as president of the College Crusade [formerly the Children’s Crusade] of Rhode Island, an organization that provides mentorships, college-readiness programs, and scholarships for low-income students from grade six through high school. For six of those years, the organization worked closely with the Providence School Department as the lead partner in a major high school redesign initiative funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York.
Currently, Harrison is vice president of programs at the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, which in November 2008 helped launch a major initiative to redesign high schools in four New England states.
Harrison spoke with Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman about the relationships between school district central offices and the community.
Q: From your experience, how would you characterize the relationship between district central offices and the community?
LISTEN [1 minute, 50 seconds]
HARRISON: I think that more often than not, the relationship is one where the community is seeking something in response to some displeasure, and the central office, therefore, is in a reactionary mode. That's my observation in the time that I witnessed [the relationship] as closely as I did, in the case of Providence, Rhode Island. I cannot say that I can comment about the relationship between the central office and the community, other than the close relationship I had for six years in Providence.
More often than not, it's a reactionary
posture on the part of the central
office, reacting to some complaint or
concern or need the community states.
I did observe that there were attempts,
and there are aspects of central office
behavior that are more specifically
proactive in the nature of outreach,
client service — things that are strategies
thought of pretty much as communications
strategies.
Q: Did the district have a structure to initiate these, or were they more ad hoc?
LISTEN [2 minutes, 33 seconds]
HARRISON: Structure was definitely present in the form of dedicated staff, and maybe that by itself is a positive sign of at least an intention of the central office to be proactive — to the extent that there have been a couple of, or more, full- time people staffing a “parent office” or “parent and community involvement office.” In Providence, I believe they combined those two constituencies together in staffing up the services or links to them. So there's an actual office, and therefore there must be a whole budget — two or more people.
What I know about Providence in
recent years is that there obviously is an
intention to have a better relationship.
I know under [former superintendent]
Donnie Evans, customer relations,
client satisfaction, was put out there
as something to value and attend to.
So some of the staff behavior was carrying
out strategies pursuant to that. For
the last couple of years there have been
annual conferences bringing parents
together on a host of issues that would
help them, to be able to hear more
about or be able to discuss with other
people, to learn about resources associated
with them. I believe those have
been received favorably.
There have been attempts to
improve communications from the
central office to the parents and
stakeholder groups in the form of a
newsletter going out to parents. That
started a few superintendents ago,
starting with Superintendent Diana
Lam, and I think it's been maintained.
Successors of hers have kept up that
practice of [producing] a written
quarterly publication to parents.
Q: Aside from these efforts, you started out by saying that a lot of districts tend to be reactive. Why do you think that's the case?
LISTEN [3 minute, 36 seconds]
HARRISON: The history of there being a separation between the community and schools and families set up the modus operandi in the central office to behave in more of a siloed fashion than one would think makes sense for this industry. But with the mandates that have come down, either through state regulation or federal regulation — in the case of Rhode Island, it's School Accountability for Learning and Teaching (SALT), and No Child Left Behind at the federal level — stating clear expectations for districts to have relationships across school and community lines, across school and family lines, there is increased consciousness to do something. But it's not quite the same as if it's the central office’s invention on its own.
In other words, there have been a number of things done in response to mandates to get parents at the table, to get community organizations at the table, but they don't really play out as authentic engagement of those stakeholders. I think the way that they would is if the central offices were initiating those ideas for engaging parents and community members on their own.
I certainly have sat on many, many committees as a member of the community, where it felt it was more like people going through the motions and not really knowing fully why or what value could be gained by my presence at the table.
I certainly have sat on many,
many committees as a member of
the community, as a leader of a community
organization, as well as being
a parent of a public school student in
Providence, where it felt it was more
like people going through the motions
and not really knowing fully why or
what value could be gained by my
presence at the table.
Envisioning the Ideal
Relationship
Q: Ideally, how would the relationship
work? How would a central office be
structured to fully engage parents and
community members?
HARRISON: That is something that a community
would have to decide and therefore
I think a conversation started and
opened up by the central office with
the community around what the
common interests are between the
community and the central office of
the school district would give way
toward identifying common territory
for collaboration. Without a predicate
understanding of why people should
be working together or talking with
one another or validating one another,
you really have people just going
through motions as opposed to having
the buy-in that's generated by that
basic understanding.
Q: So would each community be unique, based on the community conditions?
LISTEN [2 minute, 51 seconds]
Building an understanding in
a particular community of why the
central office is needed, what it does,
would help the community to formulate
the understanding they need for
setting up reasonable expectations for
that central office. I don't think the
average person really understands why
a central office is needed. I'm not an
average person, per se, as education
goes; 
I'm not an educator, but I have
worked in this field for twenty years. I
do have a pretty good understanding
of why a central office is needed. At the
same time, I feel very strongly that we
have an overblown idea these days of
why we should have a central office.
I think it's time for us to reexamine the
need for a central office in the current
paradigm of education.
I think, basically, the ideal central
office is one that only exists because it
is perceived by those whom it serves
as needed, helpful, and value-added.
And it's mainly meant to serve schools,
as far as I understand. I don't know
what research would tell us about the
perceptions people in schools have
of central office. My observation is
that it is not a high opinion. There's
something fundamentally wrong. If
the only reason for a central office is to
be of service to schools, then it would
seem to me that it would be mainly
the schools themselves and the students
and parents that the schools operate for
that would be the barometer of whether
the central office is performing a needed,
essential, value-added function.
District Leadership Turnover:
A Barrier to Effective
Relationships
Q: What do you see as the obstacles that are keeping central offices from operating more effectively, particularly in relationship to the community?
LISTEN [4 minute, 33 seconds]
HARRISON: One of the real problems, not only as it
relates to a community expectation or
to the efficacy of a central office these
days, is that there is so much transience
of leadership in central office functions.
Not in the lower-level positions — there
seems to be, at least in Providence, a
high degree of stability in lower-level
positions, and the opposite for higher level
positions. 
Institutional memory
is absent. So when it comes to getting
somewhere — making some progress,
with the understanding of why the
community has a rightful place in the
education conversation, should have a
seat at the table of education discussions
and decisions — if the leadership
that has engaged the community or
validated the community as having a
rightful place in these things, if that
leadership comes and goes, it's like
you're always starting something and
never getting to second base with it.
As an example, in my twenty years in the community in Providence, operating a nonprofit that provides service to Providence students, supporting the mission it has for its students, being seated at various tables where community input was sought and supposedly with the intent that it be used, I felt many times that we were being asked the same questions, as community members, that we had been asked two years prior, four years, six years, ten years, twelve years prior. We're pretty consistent as community members in showing up and saying the same things about what our concerns are and what our desires are and what our willingness and readiness to help and what our resources are, and not seeing a response of those things actually being manifested in anything.
As far as I can see, that's substantially
related to the going and coming
of people in leadership positions whose
job it is to convene community members
or to get community input. Maybe
Providence is just a bad example, but
it's the only one I can actually speak
from. Maybe it's an example of the
worst of the kind of things we're
talking about, to the extent that we had
so many superintendents in the last
six years.
Q: I don't think that's unique to Providence.
HARRISON: I'm pretty sure it's not. I know there's a
2.7 year expected tenure of a superintendent.
And what's not stated by that
fact is that when superintendents leave,
so, too, do their high-level administrators
in great numbers; and middle-level
managers in the central office, who
tend to have some degree of stability,
get moved around, serving multiple
functions, different functions, moved
from one job to another, because those
jobs themselves change with the new
administration. So these people get
recycled into different roles.
It's a tragedy how much institutional
memory is lost. It's a tragedy, and
it's a gross waste of public resources
in the limited-resource era that we're
in. Even if we had abundant resources,
that's just not an efficacious way to run
a public operation — or any operation,
for that matter.
The Role of Community
Organizations
Q: What can community organizations, like the one you used to head, do to support central offices more effectively, or promote better relationships between central offices and communities?
LISTEN [7 minute, 9 seconds]
HARRISON:The only reason people in the community have any interest in the central office is because they're interested in the achievement of students. There are entities in the community that have other interests — namely seeing to it that there are fair employment practices or suitable hiring practices or promotional practices — those in the community whose missions are to be watchful of such things. For the most part, people and community organizations really only care about whether the students in that community are getting a good education.
I think there's a lot of work to be done to justify the central office relative to raising student achievement and making it possible for teachers to thrive in their craft.
I don't think people in the community understand the connection between the central office and how our kids are learning. I think there's a lot of work to be done to justify the central office relative to raising student achievement and making it possible for teachers to thrive in their craft and be supported and grow and be held accountable. I don't think that there's a clear understanding in the community or an appreciation of how much of that is needed and how they can be helpful to it.
In the central office, that's the kind
of stuff where there's not a lot of interest
in community engagement around.
Q: Do the organizations themselves have a
role in that education process?
HARRISON: Yes. School board affairs is where I see
a role for the community along those
lines. The policies of the school board around delivering a quality education — and doing so in a way where there's
demonstrable evidence that there's
regular, incremental progress in raising
student achievement, through the
practices at central office and school
levels — is really where there's an
important community role. Because
if your policies are not right, and the
policy-making body is accountable for
the execution of those mandates and
those policies in school practice
and in central office practice, then the
policy-makers themselves are not doing
their jobs.
There's a lot more that needs to be done to understand board role vis-à-vis central office role vis-à-vis accountability to the community. For example, in Rhode Island, there's an expectation that every year there be thoughtful consideration of the annual plan for how a district will raise its students’ achievement. There's an expectation that the community be engaged in that process, in understanding the place the district is in and what it needs to move toward, and in understanding at a school-by-school level what those nuances are. There's an expectation of community input in agreeing to strategies — not things that are purely instructional. The community is supposed to be well informed on these matters and have a seat at the table that decides what to do about these things. I think there's really poor performance against those expectations, maybe in Rhode Island overall but certainly in Providence.
The idea itself makes a great deal of sense, but I'll point to it as an example of a mandate — why it exists isn't appreciated among those who have to implement it.
Communities can play very important roles. In the absence of a community role, you have a weaker education strategy. For one thing, communities tend to have distinct personalities, cultural proclivities, norms, and values, which, even if they do not get together and articulate these and agree and vote on them as a community, nonetheless exist. And the same is true of individual schools and individual districts: they tend to have their own cultural norms, practices, and proclivities. If there's never a consideration of how similar or different these norms, proclivities, values, and cultural practices are across schools, central office, and communities, then you should fully expect that there'd be conflict between these different segments.
To put it positively, I think the more authentic outreach that a district makes to try to identify what the common interests are across schools and the community, and what can be done to try to break down barriers that prevent people from having meetings of the mind about how their common interests will be worked on in collaborative ways, the more you can maximize the use of the community as an asset and the family as an asset. Or, conversely, you set yourself up — by having such open conversations and making authentic plans — to build relationships that an education system ought to have in order to develop and educate its children and prepare them to be adults. Education, to the extent it's about kids, and because development is all about effective and positive relationships, needs to be a relationship-based industry more than it is these days.