Service, Not Controls
In Baltimore, where nine public schools are now managed by an
alliance of private companies, principals can track purchase orders at
computers on their desks. The nine schools are hooked into KPMG Peat
Marwick's financial-accounting system in Montvale, N.J. The system also
allows the schools to examine their budgets, compare their actual
expenditures with their budgets, manage their accounts, and compute
salary information. Information on warehousing, maintenance, and food
service is stored on another data base managed by Johnson Controls
World Services, which maintains the school buildings. While contracting
out the management of public schools to private companies continues to
generate opposition, Mr. Herman of Peat Marwick said more and more
school boards are expressing interest in the use of automation and
methods of controlling expenditures common in the business world.
"School boards today want to know how to control their money. They say,
'Tell us what is being spent and find ways of saving money,''' Mr.
Herman said. "Governments have tended to emphasize controls and
preventing you from doing wrong. Today people are saying, lo and
behold, let's talk about providing services and meeting kids' needs.''
Companies Lend Expertise It is a sign of the times that business
leaders, who have long been concerned about the academic quality of
schools, are increasingly volunteering to help districts update their
administrative services as well. In Providence, a committee of top
district officials and representatives of large corporations is now
working to create a human-resources system using up-to-date business
practices. The effort addresses complaints that the district does not
recruit the best-qualified teachers and fails to regularly evaluate its
employees. An assessment of the district by the Providence Public
Education Fund also found that it has a "woefully inadequate
data-collection system.'' The district, the report says, could not
provide such information as the average teacher salary or
teacher-attendance rate at each school. The group also is pressing for
the district to develop much more detailed information on student
achievement, including whether graduates go on to college, information
about the impact of numerous suspensions on students, and breakdowns of
test scores and grades by ethnic group and race. Central
administrators, especially, "do not know enough about their schools,''
the report says. "For a system to be effective,'' said Daniel D.
Challener, the director of the study, "it has to make data-driven
decisions, not decisions based on anecdotal information.'' Providence
businesses also have been lending their expertise on data management
and public relations to the district. The involvement of businesses
should make it easier for the superintendent and school board to
persuade the city to pay for a new information system, Mr. Challener
said. 'Prepared To Testify' In Montgomery County, the businesses that
were involved in the Corporate Partnership on Managerial Excellence
included large national corporations such as Bechtel, Martin Marietta,
and Marriott. The local telephone and power companies also
participated. "Business wants to roll up its sleeves and participate
and feel that they're doing something,'' said Lawrence A. Shulman, a
former member of the Maryland Board of Education who organized the
partnership's nine-month study. Because they have gained firsthand
knowledge of the system's needs, Mr. Shulman said, the companies are
"prepared to testify'' before other political bodies to help see that
the administrative improvements are made. Mr. Vance, the district's
superintendent, said some of the partnership's recommendations are
being adopted immediately, including adding a candidate-tracking system
in personnel, computerizing the transportation system, and allowing
employees to have online access to the payroll. No More Privileged
Information In another Washington suburb, meanwhile, school
administators in Fairfax County, Va., are realizing that
"administration and instruction are more and more, at the school level,
overlapping,'' Dolores Bohen, the assistant superintendent for
communications, said. The district plans to hire a consulting firm to
help with "systems planning'' to make sure that people in the
organization have access to the data they need, whether it relates to
personnel and budgets, demographics, or instructional technology.
Connecting such data and giving people easier access to it are the
major issues the district hopes to tackle,
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