respond with an unrelated grant proposal focusing on school
boards.
“We felt we could make a case for how school board
members can be partners in student achievement, and how
they can be catalysts for — or sometimes even barriers to —
improving learning,” says Peifer, the grant proposal’s princi-
pal author. “However, writing a grant proposal for the existing
RFP, which was targeted at practitioners, was kind of like
trying to put a square peg in a round hole. So, frankly, we got
our mallet out and we forced it.”
IASB’s proposal focused on the unique training needs of
school boards, which have been shown to positively influence
and impact student achievement as governing and policymak-
ing bodies. The basis for the grant proposal was the Iowa
Association of School Boards’ “Lighthouse” study. Released
in 2000, it included nearly 160 interviews with board mem-
bers and educators in three high- and three low-achieving
districts over the course of nearly two years. All other things
being equal, a major difference between high- and low-
achieving districts was their school boards, which in high-
achieving districts:
• Consistently expressed the belief that all students can
learn;
• Were more knowledgeable about teaching and learning
issues, including school improvement goals, curriculum,
instruction, assessment and staff development;
• Used data to make decisions;
• Created a supportive workplace for staff; and
• Involved parents and communities in education.
The state was convinced. Although IASB’s proposal did
not fulfill the requirements of its original RFP, ISBE nonetheless awarded it an annual grant of $250,000 — now in its
seventh year — to develop and deliver the TAG program.
Target: Student Learning
Introduced in 2004, TAG is an assemblage of fee-based
training workshops — valued at approximately $11,400 —
that normally are offered ad hoc to school districts and school
board members. For the purposes of TAG, however, they were
packaged into a linear curriculum that’s offered at no cost to
school districts or districts with schools that have not made
AYP for two consecutive years. A voluntary program for qualifying boards, it’s delivered incrementally in two phases, each
of which takes approximately 18 to 24 months to complete
under the guidance of a dedicated TAG counselor.
“Board members are not paid for their time, so it’s a huge
commitment,” says TAG Consultant Debra Larson. “To make
it as easy as possible for them, we go into their districts to do
the training. We’ll do it Saturday mornings, evenings — what-
ever works for them.”
After an initial orientation to the program, Phase One —
which requires nine to 10 training sessions totaling 28 to
31 hours — begins with a board self-assessment, or Board
Governance Review (BGR), the goal of which is getting school
board members to critically evaluate their performance for the
purpose of benchmarking and goal-setting.
“The board self-evaluation helps us see where the board
is, in terms of internally working together, and how each
School Board Stats
3. 2
4
2
24
The number of school districts in
Illinois.
The number of Illinois school districts
that are IASB members.
The number of board members on the
typical school board.
The average tenure of a school board
superintendent.
The typical term of an elected school
board member.
The number of years between school
board elections.
The average percentage of school
board turnover in Illinois since 1987.
school board member is doing individually,” Larson says. “It
allows us to pinpoint, name and identify targets the board
wants to hit.”
Each school board sets its own TAG program goals based
on IASB’s “Foundational Principles of Effective Governance”
(see sidebar, p. 16), then engages in a series of workshops
during which its members learn the proper roles and respon-
sibilities of a governing board; the correct process for approv-
ing school and district improvement plans, which are required
under NCLB; and the importance of data-based decision
making.
The nucleus of Phase One, however, is the Targeting Student Learning Workshop (TSL), which IASB created in 1996
as a member of the Five-State Policy Project, a consortium of
five state school board associations — in California, Illinois,
Maine, Pennsylvania and Washington — that authored the
“Targeting Student Learning Workbook,” a tool that helps
school boards create and evaluate policies that promote
student learning in eight different categories, including governance and planning, academic standards and assessment,
education program, curriculum, instruction, learning environment, professional standards and parent/community engagement.
“The five states identified eight categories of policies,
which they then expanded into 30 policy topics that affect
student learning,” says TAG Consultant Steve Clark. “TSL
is a four-step process that teaches the board how to assess
and develop policy that supports student learning; the board
then selects one of the 30 policy topics and goes through the
Please consult the Association Forum’s “Volunteer
and Staff Relationship” Professional Practice Statement for more information about fostering critical
leadership and partnership roles. Visit association-
forum.org>Resources>Samples and Best Practice
Guidelines>Professional Practice Statements.
