Resources Management
Maureen W. McClure
Administrative and Policy Studies 3101
School of Education
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 US
Spring 2001
5S56 Forbes Quad
Contact information:
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1.412.648.7114 |
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1.412.624.2609 |
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5K38 Forbes Quad |
This course focuses on the development of accountability systems to support teaching and learning. Education relies, in both the public and private sector, in part on the concept of public trust. Parents need to believe that schools provide safe places for their children to learn. School administrators need to publicly demonstrate that they are providing the best services possible with the resources they have. Accountability systems are the core of the information system needed for effective strategic planning. Accountability requires the capacity to speak the ‘language’ of finance.
This course helps students learn to describe accountability systems and their consequences for teaching and learning.
Each student will develop a detailed site-based case study that maps institutional accountability systems and assesses their consequences. The case study will be created as a Word document with appropriate hyperlinks. Weekly homework assignments will serve as the base of the case study.
Readings:
Kearns, K. P. 1996. Managing for Accountability: Preserving the Public Trust in Public and Nonprofit Organizations. San Francisco: Jossey Bass.
This course also uses the Internet, local materials and student-generated materials.
Access to www.aefa.org and www.ginie.org
Recommended:
Goertz, M.E. and A.Odden. School-Based Financing. 1999. (Annual 20th yearbook of the American Educational Finance Association, Vol. 20). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Pennsylvania School
Boards Association. Understanding
School Finance: A Basic Guide for Pennsylvania School Directors.
Westbrook, K. ( Ed.). 1998. Technology and the Educational Workplace : Understanding Fiscal Impacts (Annual Yearbook of the American Education Finance Association, Vol 18) Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Parrish, T.B., J. G. Chambers and C.M. Guarino (Eds). 1999. Funding Special Education. (Annual Yearbook of the American Educational Finance Association, Vol. 19). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.
Short version and study guide to Machiavelli's classic text, The Prince.
The full text can be found here, it is about 44 pages. Anyone who works in a bureaucracy should read it every five years or so. Some of you may have the text from other courses. If you are interested in more about Machiavelli's life and commentary about his work by others, you can do an on-line search for related study guides. My favorite hardcopy edition can be found here. You can order recommended texts directly, on-line or through the Pitt bookstore.
You should also read books that describe children’s school experience. I am increasingly concerned with stories about how teachers ignore the effects of peer culture on children.
Katz, J. 2000. Geeks
: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho. New York: Villard Books.
Pipher, M.B.
1995 Reviving
Ophelia : Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. New York: Ballantine Books
Bissinger, H G. 2000. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. Da Capro Paperback.
You should also be well-versed in regional culture and economic development. What impact do the old steel and coal industries have on school districts? What are the impacts of the new economies of finance, service and high-tech? Who is moving out of the region? What are the mobility rates? Do alumni stay in the region or move elsewhere in search of jobs? Who is moving into the region? How is education treated in the local community? As a tax drain or an investment in development?
Regional History:
W. Serrin. 1993. Homestead: The Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town. New York: Vintage Books.
D. McCullough. 1968. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Touchstone Books.
J. Spring. 1998. Education and the Rise of the Global Economy. Mahnwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
R. H. Frank and P.J. Cook. 1995. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. New York: Penguin Books.
You can add to these lists with haiku reviews. (under 100 words). Extra-credit.
This course should help learn plan integrated, strategic coordination of human, financial and information resources using technical and interpretive perspectives.
A unique feature of this course will be its focus on the integration of "best fit" management, "shared power" and "wise action."
· The integration of management and educational practice will be a distinctive component of this course. Most educational institutions do not have management systems that carefully link educational priorities with both financial investments and assessments of effectiveness.
· "Best fit" refers to strategies based on comparative advantage. It presumes that each educational institution is a unique entity within a diverse and competitive community; thus no "one best way" can easily fit all schools or all school populations. This course seeks to discourage generic thinking that leads to wasteful "bandwagon" practices. This course moves school management away from standardized, comprehensive tactics toward strategies for a targeted mix of student and community needs.
· "Shared power" refers to educational management practices that are negotiated across groups with legitimate claims to school resources. This approach requires a movement away from earlier notions of "command" or "industrial" leadership that tries to control conflict toward a vision of "neighborly support" that recognizes conflict as inherent to sustainable communities, creative markets and vibrant democracies. This new approach is necessary because socio-cultural, political, regulatory, instructional, technical and financial environments have become too complex for highly centralized, top-down management practices. Professional work cannot be planned like factory work; it is art, emerging from history, experience and social relationships. It cannot be generic because each person is unique.
· Principles of "wise action" are constructed through negotiations with those who share power but do not necessarily share the same values. Without explicit concern for competing values, school systems can be corrupted by the pressures of the expediency of conformity and unequal bargaining power.
Good management practices should be constructed from the creative tension between theory grounded in experience, experience grounded in an understanding of different viewpoints, and a willingness to share power.
Some experience in schools and basic uses for microcomputers
This course is called a "studio course," meaning that it emphasizes self-directed learning and "hands on" experience. Students for this course come from across the university and around the world. Some have extensive professional experiences in resources management; others have none. The course is geared as much to learning from each other as to learning directly from me. This way we can "collect water from many streams, instead of relying on one small font." In the past, a teacher was often the "expert," an owner of knowledge kept current by reading and research. The teacher almost always knew a lot more than the student. Today, the explosion of information and technology has "decentered" the professor in a professional graduate school. It is no longer possible to stay current even in small areas of interest. Administrators, generalists almost by definition, are faced with overwhelming growth in knowledge and technology. If that weren’t trouble enough, there are currently major shifts in thinking about resources management that are making many current practices obsolete.
If you think this course can teach you everything you need to know, you may be sadly disappointed. The course can only help orient your learning. Each topic is an entire field of study. Thousands of scholars all over the world are working in different disciplines to help your understanding. No individual can be a knowledge "sovereign." We need neighbors to get by.
The most important lesson to learn about resources management is that is certainty is no longer possible. It is a simple but profound idea. In a "functional world" (these are the folks who say they live in the REAL world...and often imply that academics don’t), everything is self-evident. No interpretation is necessary. It appears to be just common sense. Alas, common sense is often neither common nor sensible. Many claim to know the rules that work for everybody. Functionalists are easy to recognize. They talk a lot about rules and use generic language.
Most of the current US management literature uses generic language without much reference to history or culture. Functionalism works best in predictable environments and makes a very useful contribution to the profession because it allows for the creation of standardization and routines that can help make schools more efficient.
Interpretists reject "generic" language and focus on the unique ways in which people create culture language in response to experience and history. They emphasize how metaphors frame thinking. They believe that viewing a problem from many ways may be better than viewing it from only one way, especially in an increasingly culturally complex global economy. Alas, this means a lot more work because generic thinking can fail. No one professor, however, can be an expert on educational resources management practices in every country.
Most of the functionalist literature on resources management focuses on a machine metaphor of "command" and "control." This machine metaphor dominated administrative thinking about resources after World War II. After the war, men returned to work and brought what they had learned in the war with them. Politics became the battlefield in the "cold war." As the cold war political alliances shift, attention began to shift to "economic wars." Are we headed for peaceful trade among neighbors or will we frame work as war for the next ten generations? What are the implications for education’s contribution to economic and social development?
This course examines the political and financial aspects of planning in educational institutions from a "post-modern" viewpoint. Effective administrators must help others design a coherent experience of their everyday work in complex organizations. In order to accomplish this, they must negotiate financial, and information resources with their neighbors. "Modern" or "systems" prefer "sovereign" approaches that assume that organizations are best controlled by leaders who "command and control" workers. Sometimes the leadership is humane, but the language of leaders rarely engages neighbors. It often focuses instead on a) discovering the right set of rules to applied to "the situation," b) creating roles for participation that enhance their position, or c) earning privilege through moral example.
Most of the language of "human resources" in the US is modernist. "Post-modern approaches" assert that organizations are too complex to be planned for and controlled by "leaders," no matter how visionary. It assumes that professional organizations are more like guilds than factories. Resources allocation in a postmodern approach emerges from voluntarist negotiation, not deterministic control. Thus effective resource allocation cannot be intelligently handed down from the top. It emerges instead from the dynamics of history and past choices and must be continuously negotiated.
The hard part about a voluntarist approach is that it refuses to embrace social certainty, arguing that the smartest and most moral, visionary leader may not be as effective as an entire organization of visionary and moral neighbors. The former derives from a mythology of war. The latter from a mythology of peace. In a voluntarist approach you are given the right to responsible dissent and can reject ideas without committing acts of personal disloyalty.
Assignment #1
January 3, 2001
Resources Management
McClure
Homework
Assignment for January 10th
Bring
a copy of an educational institution’s strategic plan.
Kearns, Parts One and Two, pp. 1-150
January 17th Collect basic site documents you will need for the course.
Treasure Hunt off campus at case study site (no formal class at Pitt)
Document the links between strategic planning policy processes and accountability systems at a site. Try to collect copies of documents that answer as many of these questions as possible.
Assignment #2
January 10, 2001
Resources Management
McClure
University of Pittsburgh
1. Collect roster for class
2. Discuss reasons for being in class
3. Describe concept of mapping resource flows
a. The bathtub
i. Inflows-revenue generation
1. Plumbing
2. Location of Sources
3. Quality of Sources
ii. Outflows-resource allocation
1. Operations
2. Capital expenditures
3. Savings
iii. Importance of generational accountability
1. Sources of flows
2. Returns to sources
iv. Restrictions to resource flows
1. Legislative mandates
2. Collective bargaining
4. Discuss the problems of mandates from students’ experiences: What are the biggest resource problems in terms of gaps between expectations and resources needed to achieve them?
5. Three small groups: Map an institutional resource flows around a mandate from source to evaluation of consequences. Who drives inflows? Who evaluates outcomes?
a. External –special ed
b. Internal- alumni achievement
c. Mixed-collective bargaining
6. Clarification of Treasure Hunt
Assignment #3
January 17, 2001
Resources Management
The purpose of the Treasure Hunt is to link strategic planning to operations and evaluation by mapping flows of resources in and out of the institution. There are many networks of policy systems that flow in and out of institutions. Strategists need to be able to describe their conditions and their consequences.
How well does your district or organization describe and analyze these conditions?
Here are some suggestions to help you get started on your case studies
1. What are the major sources of revenues and what percentages of the operating budget do they contribute?
2. What lies behind these sources, and how stable are their flows?
i. Local resources- property and income taxes, fees, etc.
ü How many taxpayers per student?
ü What percentage of income is wage income? Interest income?
ü What is the percentage distribution of property taxes across residential (owner, rental), commercial, industrial and other?
ü Who are the three largest commercial or industrial property tax payers? What kinds of businesses are they in? To what extent are the businesses local, regional, national or global? What kind of economic shape are they in and what are there chances for growth?
ü What is the distribution of income in the county? What percentage of people earn as much as the average schoolteacher?
ii. State and federal resources-
ü How much of state revenue is unrestricted?
ü How much is categorical - attached to legislative mandates?
ü Are there gaps between what the district actually pays out in order to meet the mandates and what they receive from the state? How is this measured?
1. Alumni Resources
ü What percentage of students enrolls in college?
ü What percentage of alumni completes their four year degree?
ü What percentage of local taxpayers are graduates of the district?
ü What range of occupations do alumni enter?
ü How much do alumni contribute to the district each year?
2. Teacher Resources
ü What is the distribution of teachers by teaching degree? What percentage graduated from regional institutions?
ü What percentage of teachers graduated from the district?
ü What percentage of teachers were hired from out of state?
ü What percentage of teachers own passports and have traveled internationally?
ü What documents link the district’s strategic plan and its collective bargaining agreement?
3. Standards
ü What is the per student cost of providing an elementary school reading program?
ü What is the per student cost of providing an advanced placement course?
ü What is the per student cost of providing a district football program?
ü What is the cost of having most students meet a math standard?
4. Special Populations
ü What is the per student cost of creating individualized programs for special needs students?
ü What is the per student cost of transporting special needs students to other less restricted environments?
This should help get you started. Please remember, these are only guidelines to help you start thinking about mapping resource environments.
Assignment #4
January 24, 2001
Resources Management
What are the principal connections between district-level strategic planning and resources management?
The US has a highly decentralized system of public education with fragmented government funding levels. How do school districts integrate the mandates and funds of local, state and federal levels of government?
What are the dilemmas of accountability? How can people agree if they working from different premises of what is good?
Notes: Why Resources Management important?
Sustainability of efforts
· Program
· District
· Collective bargaining
Focus on district tax base
Tax equation
Yield = Base * Rate
Mil
Market Value
Assessed Value
PA competing incentives
County controls assessments
Districts control millage rates
Groups learned from treasure hunt
· Most clueless: Who sits on strategic planning team
o Economic development people?
· Strategic plan and budget disconnect
· Cost and trust inversely proportional
· Bargaining contract drive strategic plan
Assignment #5
January 31, 2001
Resources Management
i. Costs of getting the deal
ii. Costs of cultural communications: The price of comfort (work, professional interests, location, sports, race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc.)
i. Years of service
ii. Levels of education
iii. Bumps
iv. Impact Analysis
i. Health
ii. Insurance
iii. Educational
iv. Other
Assignment: Finish reading Kearns. Bring copy of school district budget to class. Will ask how aligned with start plan, collective bargaining agreement and state and federal mandates to support accountability through student achievement.
Assignment #6
February 7, 2001
Resources Management
1. Report on group discussion of collective bargaining
2. Any awareness development stories?
3. Accountability book
a. Accountability matrix
b. Multiple perspectives
i. Performance
1. Organizational
2. Professional
3. Student
ii. Voice
1. Stakeholders
c. Policy alignment
d. Transparency
4. The budget as an accountability instrument
a. Transparent alignment of budget and strategic plan
b. How do we know that the money is going to support district objectives?
5. The budget as a compliance document
a. Insure mandate compliance transparency
6. The budget as an investment plan
7. The budget as a building-level document
8. How is the budget aligned with state and federal mandates?
a. Standards
b. Special education
c. Other
Group discussion: What are the key elements of the budget and what do they tell you? What is not there, and how might its absence be an obstacle to reaching the district’s strategic goals?
Policy
Alignment Case Study
Resources Management
Administrative Accountability: Demonstrating that what schools do does make a difference
Administrative accountability systems act as damage control from external threats and internal disconnects. If someone in the newspaper reports that the collective bargaining agreement or the curriculum in your district is an obstacle to student performance, and that market mechanisms, such as vouchers or tax credits needed to be directed toward more professionally oriented schools or schools with a ‘no-frills curriculum’, how prepared to respond would your district be?
As a new principal or superintendent, you will need to know:
1. To what extent are the major policy instruments of the district aligned with the district’s strategic vision and goals?
2. What are the district’s different stakeholders public perspectives on district accountability and how do they ‘map’ relative to each other?
Alignment as a strategic key to resource management
How do the major policy instruments of the district (strategic plan, collective bargaining agreements, budget, state and federal mandates) come together to strengthen or divert resources invested in classroom level teaching and learning?
You will need ‘rich, thick’ descriptions of the formal documents, policies and events that link major policy instruments.
You will need to know how key stakeholders view district accountability.
The purpose of the case is to describe and map as fairly as possible the policy network of major instruments and their connections, and to describe how others interpret district level accountability issues. The first is a map that documents alignment. The second is a map of how accountability is portrayed by key stakeholders.
The case study will be a public document; so don’t include anything that should be confidential. It will be about ten pages with appendices. It will be written in Word with hyperlinks to appropriate documents if available.
A first draft is due March 28th.
Assignment #7
February 14, 2001
Resources Management
McClure
1. Other policy instruments as your strategic information system
Map
Schedule
Professional development plan
Hiring and promotion policies
School newsletter, other community reporting documents
Curriculum guides
Lesson plans
Policy workflows
How do the driving policy documents support the achievement of district goals?
How are the connected?
How are they interpreted?
2. Policy Workflow
Decision trees
How many steps to get from here to there?
How many forms must be used?
How many desks must be crossed?
How many signoffs are needed?
3. Budgeting to Transform Schools: A Political Economy
http://www.naschools.org/respub/oddenbud.pdf
Larry Picus. Site-Based Management in Goertz and Odden.
Central management benefits (Economies of Scale)
Support school site operations, management and instructional leadership
Pay utility bills
Transport children
Feed children
Support central office budgeting, purchasing, payroll, reporting
Capital construction
Investments
Site management
Support instruction
Constraints
Collective bargaining agreements
Salaries and benefits
Workloads
State and Federal mandates (Uncontrollable costs)
School board policies
Budgeting as Planning, Political, Social, Economic and Legal Processes (McKinney)
Planning process that operationalizes strategic plan
Purposes
Sets priorities and policy direction
Accountability instrument
Mutual contract
Communication
Motivational control
Monitoring of service (Labor cost variance)
Resource allocation
Annual cycles
Budget analysis
Debits and Credits
Current distribution
Growth rates
Budget to Budget
Actual to Actual
Variance analysis
Projections
Presentations
Budgets are not Costs
Incomplete (volunteers, use of other locations)
Types of costs
Controllable and uncontrollable
Capital and operational
Direct and Indirect
Fixed (Semi/step) and variable (Semi/range)
Need to map costs
3. What can you learn from the budget?
a. Distribution (the pie chart)
b. Analysis of variance
4. How does your budget reflect Kearn’s accountability standards (compliance, etc.)?
5. Assignment: Read Costs and Budgets
Assignment #8
February 21, 2001
Resources Management
McClure
University of Pittsburgh
1. Review budget scan What did you learn?
2. Thinking about resources as flows (cash, incentives, preferences) Policy as a dynamic- fragility of public policy versus private policy-generational implications –show dilemma map
3. Policy as means of aligning flows of preferences and incentives toward stated goals
4. Beyond compliance and control toward fiscal accountability (from McKinney, p.8)
a. Compliance- Are you meeting the requirements of the law?
b. Control- How transparent is the fiscal system?
c. What indicators would permit us to assess the health of a school/district?
d. What is the most effective approach for forecasting revenue and expenditures?
e. What are the best methods for meeting the needs and the demands of the community?
f. What are the best systems, methods, and techniques that must be created to enhance performance, to minimize fraud, waste and abuse, and promote maximum accountability?
5. Measuring resource flows: Basic terms
a. Macro:
i. GNP, GDP, GSP indicators of production shows demand for goods and services and the costs of supplying that demand
ii. CPI indicator that measures the change in prices in a basket of goods with a fixed quantity and quality for average (urban) consumers-representative of prices of goods and services that consumers use everyday- CPI indexing is often used in collective bargaining as an escalator-sometimes referred to as the cost-of-living index.
b. Types of economic indicators by time: leading, coincident, lagging
c. Why important for education?
i. Pulse of the economy, and hence taxpayers and voters-closely tied to taxation –taxes not created equal- taxes grow and decline at different rates- income and sales grow faster and decline faster than property taxes which grow and decline more slowly- tax stability traditionally seen as an advantage for education
d. Accounting
i. Types:
a. Financial (internal and external fiscal statements in conformance with GAAP-balance sheet, earnings, fund balances, cash flow-budgeted and actual)
b. Managerial (internal management of programming, decision-making and control-historical and projections-link to strategic planning)
c. Cost (links fiscal and management-budgeting, cost analysis, standard costing-overhead, process costing-per unit-e.g. cost per student per day, activity costing-e.g. costs per course taught)
ii. Cost Behavior
a. Fixed cost (e.g. rent) ; semifixed or step cost (e.g. additional classroom teacher); variable (textbooks) and semivariable (benefits packages)
b. Cost/expense centers focus of responsibility (district, school, program)-smallest area of responsibility for which costs and expenses are collected
iii. Basis of Accounting- when are transactions (revenues, expenditures, transfers and liabilities) recognized?
a. Cash- When cash is paid or received-inflow and outflow-cheapest, least accurate
b. Accrual- When charges are incurred, earned, consumed or transferred, even when cash does not change hands-most accurate, most costly
c. Modified Accrual-(interest,debt, inventory, disbursements on cash basis) more accurate than cash, less costly than accrual
iv. Principal Accounting Statements
a. Balance sheet (a picture in time): current assets (cash, accounts receivable, inventory), fixes assets (land buildings, machinery, furniture, other equipment)-depreciation, current liabilities (accounts, taxes, salaries, insurance payable, short terms loans), long term liabilities (more than year-long-term loans, bonds, mortgages), funds (restricted and unrestricted)
b. Income statement (revenues and expenses over a given time period)
c. Funds flows (sources and uses)
v. Funds Accounting System
a. Segregation by restrictions (activities, objectives, regulations)
b. Assets + Expenditures = Liabilities + Revenues + Fund Balance
c. Types of Funds (general, special revenue, capital projects, debt service, special assessments, enterprise, internal service, plant, property and equipment, endowment, fiduciary, expendable, restricted, nonrestricted)
d. Debits and Credits- sides of the ledger (Assets D+, C- = Liabilities D-,C+)
Assignment #9
February 28, 2001
Resources Management
McClure
University of Pittsburgh
i. What can go wrong
· Prevention controls
· Detection controls
ii. Administrative controls (programmatic)
iii. Accounting (fiscal)
iv. General Principles
· Competent personnel and rotation of duties (limits to gains from specialization)
· Assignment of responsibility (when everyone is in charge, no one is in charge)
· Segregation of responsibility for related duties (checks and balances)
· Separation of operations and accounting (Segregate transactions authorization, accounting transactions and asset custody)
· Proofs are security measures
· Proper accounting for transactions
· Adequate safeguarding of assets
· System of authorizations (audit trail)
v. Checklists of questions with yes or no answers
vi. Event cycles
· Map event cycle series of steps required to carry out a recurrent task, activity or function
· Analyze general control environment-organizational structure, management attitude, personnel, extent and type of delegation of authority, polices and procedures, budgeting and reporting practices, other checks and balances
· Document the event cycle –narrative or flow map
· (Evaluate and test)
i. Start at end: classroom level student achievement and track documents back to inputs
ii.
“The
Changing External Policy Context and the Role of the School Principal”,
Bruce G. Barnett
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies , University of Northern Colorado,
Greeley, Colorado (USA)
www.ncslonline.gov.uk/resources/papers/ev_auth_barnett.asp
iii. Output work products ® Input Work Products
i. Start with the existing policy document as an input and sequence towards outputs
ii. Input Work Products ® Output Work Products
i. Backwards from classroom student achievement (on the far right)
ii. Forward from policy documents (on the left)
iii. Note broken links or gaps
iv. How are they linked by personnel and work documents
· Local School Board ®Collective Bargaining ®Budget ®Payroll ®Teacher ®Lesson plans (Are there board policies regarding lesson plans? )
· Strategic Plan ® Curriculum Standards ® Lesson Plans
i. Sequencing may take more than one path (the assembly process)
ii. Exercise (if time): Map morning activities from getting up to inspecting your dress before you leave.
·