Local Board Chair Perspectives on Reform in North Carolina: State Decentralization as a Challenge for District Leadership

Abstract

Investigators interviewed 16 local board chairs in North Carolina to glean their perspectives toward the ABCs legislation, a landmark reform package. We also assessed whether these chairs demonstrate the ability to conceptualize school policy within larger systemic policy frameworks. Two themes comprised our analysis of chair perspectives. First, our chairs reverberated the ubiquitous “dissatisfaction with government.” Because the state bureaucratic machinery over the previous 15 years had not improved schools to the satisfaction of their clientele, the forthcoming autonomy for districts promised by the ABCs was viewed as a much-welcomed breath of fresh air for the local agency. Our second theme provided a paradox between centralization and decentralization forces within state policy. Decentralization meant loss of political protection traditionally provided by the state bureaucratic apparatus in Raleigh. This lack of organization buffering threatened to tilt the playing field in favor of parents as “smart shoppers” organized into self-interest groups over poorer parents lacking in political influence; in favor of larger districts over smaller districts in terms of district-level resources; and in favor of wealthy districts over poorer districts at least in terms of local ability to raise tax revenue. Five of these 16 chairs exhibited systemic thinking and positioned school reform within larger conceptual frameworks (community colleges, social agencies, and public attitudes toward marketplace competition). Casting reform as a vague dissatisfaction with the status quo, the other 11 chairs exhibited far less systems thinking. This assessment casts some doubt as to their leadership capacity in dealing with this study's emerging hypothesis: The very autonomy that systemic decentralization provides localities makes them potentially vulnerable to local activism across a state's political landscape and may result in inequities for certain groups.