Assessing School Council Contribution to the Enabling Conditions for Instructional Capacity Building

Abstract

This study identified the enabling conditions related to building instructional capacity created by the councils in three high-performance schools in an urban district. The authors collected the data through observation, interview, and document mining. School-level data were sorted inductively into themes through constant comparative analysis. These school-level data then were analyzed cross-case. Four enabling conditions generalized across the three councils:(a) principal facilitation of decision making through sharing power with council members,(b) schoolwide networking facilitating “bottom-up” problem solving with staff and parents,(c) a focus on student achievement through use of assessment data, and (d) promotion of staff collective accountability for student achievement. The authors extended these findings to those of other studies and discussed why other enabling conditions identified in the literature were not found in this study: financial resources, systematic professional development, program coherence, and “constructive” conflict.