Over the last two years ASCD has hosted four meetings of a consortium of school districts pioneering local use of performance assessment. In May we met in Edmonton, Alberta, hosted by the Edmonton Public Schools, the only Canadian district in the group. In our brief visit, I was impressed by the clarity and sense of direction that pervade the Edmonton schools. It seemed to me a good example of what some people mean by systemic change.
One of several things that makes Edmonton unusual is the 20-year tenure of its remarkable superintendent, Michael Strembitsky. With such continuity of leadership one would expect more constancy of purpose than in school systems where leaders come and go every two or three years. But equally important is Strembitsky's deeply-held convictions about people and organizations—and his crusade to put these ideas into practice.
We've heard a lot in recent years about site-based management, but no district in North America has taken the concept further than Edmonton. Program and personnel decisions are made at the school level. If a school staff wants an assistant principal or a teacher aide, they allocate their funds accordingly. Our tour group was driven from school to school in a bus, but the district doesn't own any buses; this one belongs to a particular school, which uses it for field trips. At this point, 87 percent of the entire operating budget is controlled by individual schools, and Strembitsky says he won't be satisfied until he can reduce the central office share to 6 percent.
One way he is doing that is by making more and more services self-supporting. Schools purchase the services they want. If schools do not consider a service valuable, it will not survive. A crucial point is that schools have the resources to make such purchases. If they did not, the whole arrangement would be pointless.
An observer might reasonably ask whether Edmonton is really a system or just a collection of autonomous schools. Paradoxically, Edmonton strikes visitors as more focused than many U.S. districts. The reason is a set of well-defined outcomes that schools are expected to meet and a sophisticated data-collection process that yields information on everything from student achievement to students' satisfaction with their school to parents' perceptions of their ability to influence school decisions.
I don't want to imply that everything in Edmonton is idyllic. Educators there are contending with many of the same problems that confront educators in other parts of the world. And the form of school-based management practiced in Edmonton would not be acceptable in some highly politicized communities in the United States because it is principal-centered: each principal determines the way teachers and parents will be involved. But despite the lack of mandatory school councils and so on, parents and teachers in most schools are satisfied with their participation (according to the data) because the decisions that affect them are made at the local school, where they feel more influential.
As is often the case with exceptional institutions, Edmonton's style is closely associated with its single-minded leader. Mike Strembitsky is a big, strong man with a rugged face that reflects his Ukrainian ancestry. A former hog farmer and builder, he still loves to swing a hammer; a few years ago he built a new house for himself. And after 20 years, he continues to bring a working man's energy to his job, immersing himself in every aspect of the organization, continually refining the decision-making apparatus. He remembers how as a teacher and assistant principal he was frustrated by bureaucratic sluggishness and he is determined to unleash the creativity and commitment of educators who work directly with children and their parents.
My description cannot do justice to the complexity of Edmonton's model or the fine points of Strembitsky's thinking. But with the current interest in systemic reform, Edmonton offers a glimpse of what can happen when all parts of a system—a state, a nation, a district, or a school—operate in accord with a single set of well-conceived ideas, especially when those ideas reflect a keen understanding of human motivation.
