John T. Mallan Division for the Study of Teaching Syracuse University Syracuse, New York The comments in this paper are in no way to be interpreted as reflecting a collective position by school boards on the issue of inservice. One learns early in boardmanship that one does not speak for one's colleagues. Rather, the discussion is one school board member's attempt to reflect on a number of interacting issues subsumed under the concept of inservice. It is hoped that there may be value in noting how the person on the other side approaches the issue of: professional credibility; the rhetoric of inservice promises; a questionable rationale for the ends and means of inservice; education of the public; shortsighted vision; and the need for a conceptional basis allowing inservice to be more competitive in the struggle for securing support. It should be pointed out that this board of education member is also professionally involved in the training of teachers and is trying to mesh the best of both worlds and not without difficulty! If my memory serves me well, the Greeks had two terms to describe two different views of approaching life's complexities: philosophy (applying mental skills to work in non-determinate situations in search of reflective wisdom) and philodoxy (the honoring of opinion rather than wisdom). As a school board member, I feel quite comfortable with the philodoxers. Close association with professional educators, teachers, administrators, colleagues, parents, citizens, legislators, and my own youngsters would suggest some familiarity. The liturgy accompanying inservice does not appear to test my degree of comfort. Accompanying this however, is a discomforting awareness of the studied recognition that school boards are increasingly viewed as impotent. Professional literature abounds with an acceptance of the erosion of and suggests that boards of education may serve an extremely limited impact on local public education. Boards are told to take a passive position, to run interference for more aggressive school administrators who, having expertise, and who, having been trained in the management of complexity, should assume increased responsibility for educational policy, program, and finance. 1 Increasing litigation, numerous legislative mandates, incoherent and diminishing state aid, and simplistic calls for accountability often lend weight to the need for enlarged professional roles. This appears to be undeniably true. It can be argued that local boards of education control (to some degree) perhaps only 15 percent of 218 Theory Into Practice