Removing Obstacles to Success and Achieving Operating Efficiency

Statement of Problem and Opportunity

All too often, teachers know what their students need and work hard to provide it, but are stymied by a lack of resources and other obstacles to success. At the same time, resources are not being used as efficiently and effectively as they should in cases of poor program management and redundancy.

Summary of Proposed Solution

Principals and teachers should be provided with school-based resources that can be used to address immediate needs. Similarly, bureaucratic and procedural obstacles to local management should be minimized. Administrative redundancies should be identified and eliminated.

Discussion and Implementation Plan

Fixing a leaky faucet should not require a burdensome requisition process. The same principle applies to the acquisition and use of educational technology. Just as principals should be given access to the resources they need to get repairs completed in a timely manner, they should also be afforded flexibility with respect to academic support resources. For example, if a teacher makes the case that some of his or her students would benefit from having access to a supplemental text or an educational computer program, the principal should have the flexibility to meet that request.

This school-based delegation of authority should contain high standards of accountability. By integrating financial reporting systems, school-based requisitions would be entered directly into the central procurement database, facilitating efforts to track expenditures and to measure effectiveness of new initiatives. Our efforts to support the creativity and innovation of teachers and principals will be coupled with results-tracking measures that help us to determine if an innovation should be replicated in other schools or discontinued altogether.

Other important components of school management reform include improving service delivery, lowering costs, and removing redundancies. The Finance & Management section of our Blueprint for Newton’s Future goes into greater detail on these and other initiatives that will control costs and improve services in the Newton Public Schools.