School Based Management

When I first started teaching, I was hired by a "group of teachers. " The system that our county had implemented was called "School Based Management." Not only did the teachers do the hiring, but they also did their own scheduling and everything was managed from the ground up. It was a great system! Then later, of course like all good things, it dissolved. It was eventually taken over by a top down management system, and I think all that was good went with it. 

When School Based Management existed, the teachers who knew about the subject topics could ask pointed questions during their interviews with a prospective future employee. The questions came from a group and the group made the decision. Nobody knows a subject better than the teacher who teaches it. Many administrators become so, because they always planned to be in management, not because of their love for teaching or the subjects they teach. 

One time I had a student transfer from another Social Studies class where the teacher had told him the incorrect number of members in Congress. I was astonished that a teacher could be so inaccurate in such a simple and important Social Studies fact. By his third year in the classroom, this same teacher applied to be an administrator and became one. Hiring new teachers would be his next responsibility, really? 

In School Based Management, the scheduling was great.  All the teachers in a department would get together and make a big chart to be filled in with teachers' class periods. The school would give us the student count and the class periods they would like for each subject. It would take a couple of hours, but by the time we were finished, we had the class schedules and every teacher had input in the master schedule. It is a shame we had to say goodbye to this system, and maybe one day they will bring it back, but for now it is only a dream.