One of the arguments for charter schools is that they give more control over a school to those who run the school on a day to day basis. In Providence, this is already happening at some public schools. For instance, Vartan Gregorian uses a form of site-based management.
Fans of site-based management also point to increased parental involvment in school management decisions as one of its benefits.
Julia Steiny has a recent ProJo article that discusses creating a form of site-based managment by giving more power to School Improvement Teams (SITs). She doesn’t discuss whether the current SITs (which every school already has) would need to be reconstituted before giving them more power, to make sure that top-down management is replaced by a responsible and accountable form of governance. Nonetheless, it’s a thought-provoking read. Here’s a link to the article.
And here are some links to site discussing site-based management:
North Central Educational Laboratory
