Thoughts After the Forum: What School Boards Are Actually For
I have often felt that the Board and the community are not on the same page about how the Board should function. After Thursday night’s candidates’ forum, I felt this more strongly than ever. So, in full transparency with the assistance of AI, I analyzed the questions asked at the forum and in the SPICE and Rainbow Families candidate survey to understand what the community’s expectations of the Board are, and whether the Board has the tools and authority to fulfill them.
What the community expects is not impossible. What it is asking for, in question after question, is accountability. Real standards. Measured outcomes. Someone with authority who is watching to keep the district moving forward, and ensuring that when things go wrong there are consequences and a path to improvement. The Board has far more power than it is currently exercising. The problem is not what the community wants. The problem is that the Board has not built the structures to deliver it.
What follows is my attempt to explain what those structures could look like.
What the Community Expects of the Board
The forum questions and the candidate survey cover a lot of ground, but five expectations come through clearly in almost every question.
Theme 1: The Community Expects the Board to Be a Culture Setter
What the community expects is for the Board to set and enforce the values that govern how students, faculty, and staff are treated in our schools. The community’s implicit assumption is that the Board has both the authority and the tools to shape school culture directly and hold the Administration accountable for establishing and maintaining that culture.
Theme 2: The Community Expects the Board to Ensure the Academic Success of All Children
What the community expects is for the Board to ensure that every child is getting the education they deserve from the schools, without having to supplement it privately. The community’s implicit assumption is that the Board has the tools and authority to intervene when the education being delivered is ineffective, as demonstrated by parents reaching into their pockets to fill the gap and unacceptable proficiency gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups.
Theme 3: The Community Expects the Board to Ensure Every Student Who Needs Support Gets It
What the community expects is for the Board to ensure that every student who needs support gets it, not just those who have already been identified. The community’s implicit assumption is that the Board has the tools and authority to intervene when increasing numbers of children are found to be in need of special education services, and too many families are unsatisfied with the services and accommodations provided.
Theme 4: The Community Expects the Board to Ensure the Hiring and Retention of Diverse Staff
What the community expects is for the Board to take responsibility for the fact that this district has lost nearly every professional staff member of color it has hired. The community’s implicit assumption is that the Board has the tools and authority to intervene in the personnel process when the district cannot attract, hire, or retain diverse staff and faculty.
Theme 5: The Community Expects the Board to Be Accountable
What runs through every one of these expectations is a common thread: the community expects the Board to be accountable for the systems and standards that govern how the district operates, not for the day to day decisions of individual teachers and administrators. The community does not expect the Board to decide that a particular teacher needs more professional development in the science of reading. But it does expect the Board to ensure that the curriculum that teacher uses is grounded in the science of reading and learning, that outcomes are being measured, and that when the system is failing children the Board has the information, the ability, and the authority to act.
What the Board Actually Has the Authority to Do
Under New York State Education Law, the Board is not an advocacy organization. It is a governing body with legally defined authority and duties. It does not unconditionally delegate authority to the superintendent, and it is a violation of New York law for the Board to delegate certain powers to the superintendent.
For example, under Education Law Section 1709, the Board has the power and the duty to prescribe courses of study and approve textbooks. Under Section 1711, it is the superintendent’s job to develop the content of each course of study, which the superintendent “shall present” to the Board for its approval. The language is mandatory, not discretionary.
What the law requires the superintendent to present to the Board is the content of the curriculum, not a consulting contract, not a purchase order for professional development services, not a PowerPoint presentation. The curriculum. For the Board’s approval. That is the Board’s duty under the law, not merely a governance best practice.
The Governance Model Our Board Has Been Operating Under, And How It Could Work Better
The answer lies in a governance framework called Policy Governance, developed by John Carver. Our Board has been operating under a version of this model for decades. While Policy Governance was originally created for corporate boards, and there are challenges in implementing it for school boards, I believe it can be made to work in our district.
Under Policy Governance, the community is not just a constituency the Board serves. It is the Board’s owner. The Board has an affirmative obligation to seek out and understand what its owners want, not wait for them to show up at a meeting and speak for three minutes. At the forum, one of the questions asked how the Board would engage the community when there are opposing camps with strongly held and conflicting views. It is a question that reflects a real desire for something more than how the Board currently operates. The community wants genuine engagement, a two way relationship with a Board that communicates back, that demonstrates through its decisions and its transparency that the different voices in the community have been heard and considered. That kind of relationship has to be built intentionally. It does not happen by itself.
The Policy Governance model draws a sharp distinction between what it calls ends and means. Ends are outcomes: what the organization exists to produce, for whom, at what cost. The Board owns ends. Means are everything else: how the organization goes about achieving those ends. The superintendent owns means. The model also introduces Executive Limitations, constraints the Board places on how the superintendent can pursue the ends, and monitoring mechanisms through which the Board evaluates whether its policies are being met.
The challenge with Policy Governance is how demanding it is to implement correctly, especially in an educational setting where establishing concrete, actionable, and measurable ends is not as clear as in the corporate world, and what happens when it is implemented poorly.
John Bauer, a governance consultant, put it plainly: when Policy Governance is adopted by boards that lack the training and skills to craft appropriate policies and work within them, organizations put themselves at significant risk of violating their fiduciary and ethical responsibilities. Our current Board and Administration inherited this system and structure, which has weakened over time because of institutional drift.
That institutional drift explains why, unlike every surrounding district, Ardsley, Pelham, Irvington, Dobbs Ferry, we do not have a Board level curriculum committee. At the forum, a fellow candidate dismissed my call for creating such a committee, saying the Board used to have one, but it did not work, so it was eliminated. And she saw no problem with this because she does not think it is the Board’s job to be involved in curriculum decisions.
But state law explicitly requires the Board to approve curriculum. A curriculum committee is not an optional extra; it is the mechanism that allows the Board to carry out its legal duty. When our curriculum committee ran into challenges, the response was not to invest in making it work better. It was to eliminate it entirely, and then to conclude that curriculum oversight is not the Board’s job. Eliminating it did not solve the problem. It institutionalized the Board’s failure to meet the community’s expectations and fulfill its legal responsibility.
Policy Levels and Executive Limitations — How Policy Governance Can Work in Practice
One of the most important and least understood aspects of Policy Governance is what it calls policy sizes, or levels of policy. The Board does not simply adopt one broad statement on a topic and call it governance. It builds a hierarchy of increasingly specific policies, each one narrowing the superintendent’s interpretive freedom a little further, until it reaches the level at which it is comfortable granting the superintendent full discretion.
The key insight is that the Board only needs to go as deep as the level at which it is genuinely comfortable with the superintendent’s judgment. Everything below that level belongs to the superintendent. But the Board has to actually do the work of going deep enough for the framework to mean anything.
To illustrate what this looks like in practice, I am going to use literacy as an example. What follows is not a proposal. It has not been researched, vetted, or discussed with anyone other than AI. It is simply an illustration of how the levels of policy can work, using an issue directly relevant to our district.
Level One — Broadest Ends Statement
All students will graduate as proficient readers capable of accessing complex texts across content areas.
This statement is almost useless on its own. Every superintendent agrees with it. There is no way to evaluate it. It tells the Administration nothing about what the Board actually wants.
Level Two — Specific Ends with Measurable Outcomes
By the end of third grade, at least 90% of students will meet or exceed grade level proficiency in reading as measured by the state ELA assessment. The district will close the proficiency gap between economically disadvantaged students and the overall student population by at least 10 percentage points within three years.
Now the superintendent knows what success looks like. The Board has a real basis for evaluation.
Level Three — Curriculum Policy
The Board’s K-3 literacy curriculum shall be grounded in the science of reading, defined as evidence-based structured literacy instruction that includes explicit systematic phonics instruction and does not use three-cueing or miscue analysis as a primary decoding strategy. The superintendent shall present any proposed curriculum for Board approval before implementation.
This is how the Board fulfills its legal obligation under Education Law Section 1711 without micromanaging the Administration.
Level Four — Executive Limitations
The superintendent shall not approve the use of assessment tools which have not been independently validated.
An Executive Limitation of this kind would ensure the district is making decisions based on valid data.
Level Five — Monitoring Requirements
The superintendent shall report to the Board twice annually on third grade reading proficiency data disaggregated by race, income, disability status, and English language learner status. Reports shall include year over year comparison to established benchmarks and a written explanation of any variance greater than five percentage points from the trajectory needed to meet the Board’s stated ends.
Now the Board has a real monitoring mechanism. It is not asking the superintendent how things are going. It is receiving specific data against specific benchmarks on a defined schedule.
The New York Law Constraint — And Why It Is Not a Problem for Policy Governance
One of the genuine challenges of implementing Policy Governance in a school district, as opposed to a corporate setting, is that the line between ends and means is not always clear. Curriculum is a perfect example. Under a strict reading of the model, curriculum selection and adoption would be a means question, entirely within the superintendent’s domain. But curriculum is not just how the district achieves its ends. In an educational setting, curriculum is the ends. What children are taught and how they are taught it are inseparable from what they learn.
This is not a fatal flaw in the model. According to the International Policy Governance Association, there is no conflict between Policy Governance and an organization’s legal responsibilities. If an outside authority requires Board actions inconsistent with Policy Governance, the Board should use a required approvals process or other device to be lawful without compromising governance.
The solution is to implement Policy Governance in a way that treats curriculum as a hybrid function, in which the Board sets specific curriculum policy, the superintendent develops and recommends curriculum that meets that policy, and the Board makes an informed approval decision. The superintendent has full operational authority to develop the curriculum. The Board retains the legal approval authority it is required to exercise. Both are satisfied.
This is not a contradiction. It is what sophisticated governance looks like when you take both the model and the law seriously.
What I Am Proposing
Board members should not be writing curriculum, managing staff, or directing individual teachers. Those are the superintendent’s domain and they should stay there.
The Board should do the hard work of building the structures to exercise the power it has. That means Ends policies specific enough to evaluate. Executive Limitations precise enough to enforce. Curriculum approval processes that fulfill the Board’s legal obligations as informed decisions rather than rubber stamps. Monitoring mechanisms that give the Board real data against real benchmarks. And a committee structure that builds the Board’s capacity to do all of the above. Committee work is so pivotal to a highly functioning Board that Irvington increased the number of Board members from 5 to 7 so there were enough members to manage all of the committee work without it being overly burdensome on any individual member.
None of that is a power struggle. None of that is micromanagement. It is a description of what the Board is legally supposed to do, and what Policy Governance requires to actually function.
At the forum, a fellow candidate said that one of her priorities as a Board member is ensuring our ELA curriculum is fully aligned with the science of reading. It is a worthy goal. But under the current governance model, how does the Board actually accomplish that? The superintendent tells the Board the curriculum is aligned with the science of reading, and the Board takes that on faith. That is not governance. That is trust without verification.
Under a properly implemented Policy Governance model, the Board would adopt a curriculum policy defining what alignment with the science of reading means, require the superintendent to present curriculum that meets that definition for Board approval, establish an Executive Limitation to prevent actions inconsistent with that policy, and require regular reporting on whether outcomes are improving. The Administration would have a clear mandate. The Board would have the information it needs to evaluate whether that mandate is being fulfilled. And the community would have a basis for holding the Board accountable for results.
Drafting policies that are specific enough to be meaningful but not so specific that they cross into operational territory requires real analytical and drafting skills. And none of it should be done unilaterally. The Ends policies, Executive Limitations, and monitoring mechanisms need to be developed collaboratively with the Administration to ensure they are realistic, achievable, and grounded in how the district actually operates. The goal is not to impose a framework on the Administration but to build one with them, so that the Board, the superintendent, the staff, and the community are all working from the same set of clearly defined expectations.
This will be hard work. I am asking for your support and your vote on May 19th so I can do this hard work for all our children and for the whole community.
