A conversation with ... Dr. Kathy Kinley 

Dr. Kathleen E. Kinley, a member of the Chaffey Joint Union High School District Board of Education in San Bernardino County, is the president-elect of the California School Boards Association and will become president in December.

A former teacher, Dr. Kinley retired earlier this year as a principal of De Anza Middle School in San Bernardino County’s Ontario-Montclair School District. She has been a member of CSBA’s Delegate Assembly since 1984 and CSBA’s Board of Directors since 1996.

Dr. Kinley holds a doctorate in educational leadership from the University of La Verne. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English and political science from San Diego State University and a master’s degree in school administration from California State University, San Bernardino. She and her husband, Jim, a public works director and civil engineer, have one daughter and two grandchildren.

What led to your interest in school administration?

I greatly enjoyed my work as a classroom teacher. However, once I became a school board member I began to work closely with school administrators and realized that I could make a difference for more students as an administrator. I spent six years as a public information officer for the Ontario-Montclair School District. That gave me time to work directly with district administrators and site administrators. Serving as a school principal gave me an opportunity to put my leadership skills to the test on a day-to-day basis, with direct interaction with students and school employees to really implement education policies.

How did your professional experience inform your work as a school board member?

As a school principal you see the real-world application of education theory, so you actually see what happens with the impact of mandates and appropriate resources or the lack of those resources. Knowing what it’s like to implement board policies gives me the experience to help me shape our board policies. Of course this is in the context of changing legislation, state budgets, federal budgets and often conflicting court cases, so as a board member I am aware that we can’t always do what we want to do in setting policies, and as an administrator I understood that. I appreciated my employing board’s efforts to provide the best services possible for our students given the restrictions placed on them. My experience as a school board member made me really aware of the constraints on the budget. I would prefer to adopt district budgets that fully fund district priorities and still fulfill the board’s responsibility to keep the district solvent, but each year we make the best of effort we can.

You’ve been a member of CSBA’s Delegate Assembly since 1984 and of the association’s Board of Directors since 1996. You’ve served on CSBA’s Executive Committee, Budget Committee, Legislative Committee and the Federal Issues Council, which monitors federal education issues and lobbies officials in Washington, D.C. What changes—for the better and worse—have you seen in the overall structure of public school governance in that time?

Overall, I have seen a reduction of local control that has come from new mandates and restrictions placed on local boards by ballot initiatives, by legislation, and by budgets. There has also been a shift to move resources and decision-making from the board level to the individual school site, often bypassing the local board. In recent years, there’s been the really unprecedented involvement of the federal government—far more federal mandates than I’ve ever seen before. We can add to that the accountability demands, both financial and academic. The local boards can be asked to forfeit their control to the state—a big shift. And, of course, very recently we have had the assault on local school governance in the form of things like mayoral takeover proposals.

On the positive side, largely through the efforts of CSBA, I have seen the development of the concept of governance teams that enable the board members and superintendents to really form strong governance teams while they’re being mindful of their respective roles. I am happy to say that more and more boards are adopting the Professional Governance Standards of CSBA to guide their work. Of course our Masters in Governance program provides in-depth training, so the good news is board members have available lots of support.

The No Child Left Behind Act will be up for reauthorization in Congress in 2007. You’ve spoken directly to federal officials in the Department of Education, the White House and Congress about this. What are your concerns as the reauthorization process proceeds?

I think we can all agree that the concept of leaving no child behind is very noble, but the actual implementation of the law has raised many concerns. We can all support accountability; however, the current requirements for adequate yearly progress virtually ensure that all schools will fail at some point. Funding has not been adequate to do what has been mandated. Both Title I and IDEA [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] have been funded at levels well below what was originally promised and certainly well below what is needed to provide the educational opportunities needed for every child to succeed. Reasonable requests by states for more time or more flexibility have not been approved by the U.S. Department of Education. That’s a frustration. However, we need to work together in California to implement some of the options and flexibility the federal law will allow.

One thing that is personally troubling to me is that often the tone of the Department of Education seems more punitive than helpful. When CSBA members have journeyed to Washington to explain the impact of the law and request help in dealing with the challenges of the regulations related to special education students, for example, or English language learners or highly qualified teachers, we’re trying to express our real-world concerns and we don’t often feel that we are listened to as much as we should be. Instead we get communications in the form of threats about withholding funding rather than recognition that the funding was not adequate to begin with. Rather than celebrating growth—particularly with California’s high standards—and recognizing that there has been improvement at many of our Program Improvement schools, they’ve countered with encouraging kids to transfer to other schools or for provision of more supplemental services. Many parents are happy with their local schools and understand that they may be in Program Improvement because of a small number of test scores. Sometimes appropriate supplemental services are not easy to access, especially in rural areas, or they require technology not readily available to high poverty students.

Now the National School Boards Association’s legislation goes a long way in addressing the shortcomings of NCLB. It’s pretty well aligned with CSBA’s own “Fix NCLB” campaign. So one of my big hopes is that CSBA will work with both the Education Coalition here in California and with NSBA to really have the reauthorization of NCLB be meaningful, to reward growth in student achievement while still keeping that lofty goal of serving kids and having high accountability. Let’s make a law that will really work for all children.

You and your husband are the parents of a daughter who now has children of her own. From a more personal point of view, what are your observations of how the education system has served them?

Overall, I am pleased with the opportunities that our public schools have provided for my child and for my grandchildren. Each of them has had teachers who believed in them and cared about them, and we know that makes a huge difference. My grandson has been able to benefit from the fact that we still have arts in our schools. He’s become very enamored with drama, and it has made a difference for him. Our granddaughter has a goal for this year: She wants to be advanced in mathematics, so she’s bought in to the standards approach—that’s a good thing. Education has obviously been a really important family value for us, which is one reason why I think my daughter, after being successful in another profession, is now a classroom teacher. What I am concerned about is that, when my husband and I were students in the California public schools system, we were well above the national average in per pupil expenditures. We both benefited from the investment of our parents’ generation in us, and right now there’s not that same level of benefit for my grandchildren and their fellow students.

More broadly, the knowledge and critical skills that all of our children will need to succeed in the future continue to change. How can our schools cultivate a process of continuous improvement in order to keep up?

Many of these issues were addressed in CSBA’s task force report, “Governance Matters: The School Board Guide to Reinvigorating High Schools,” because that’s where a lot of the change will be coming. It gives a guide to best practices and policies for relevance and rigor for our high school students. They should be better prepared for higher education. We also know there is going to be a high need for technical and career education. I think the whole principle is continuous improvement.

We just had this reiterated at the NSBA training for state presidents. One of the parts that we address in our report is the necessity for boards to have consistent data so they know what’s going on, that they approve programs that are consistent with their core values and vision, and they put in place ways to monitor so they can see whether things are working, and make adjustments if they’re not.

Of course, CSBA can help, too, because we have a wonderful staff that is constantly giving input on changing policies and changing demographics and all of that. It’s essential to have that kind of information if we’re going to meet the future needs.

What do you see as the main issues facing local school board trustees today?

They are being held accountable for greater and greater student achievement, which is of course what all of our governance standards are directed towards, but they don’t always have the necessary resources or the flexibility to implement programs or adopt materials that are best suited to the needs. We’re hoping our adequacy campaign will help with that, identifying what is truly adequate funding for schools in order to meet the education goals. We also have the issue of declining enrollment in many of our districts. In some districts attrition to charter schools has exacerbated our declining enrollment issues. Of course we’ve also had some direct questioning of the role of the board, and the importance of the role of the elected board in providing local governance. Board members are direct links to their communities, which is important in building strong governance teams with their superintendents and maintaining support for our public schools.

What will your goals be as CSBA’s president in 2006-07?

I want to work with [NSBA] President Jane Gallucci on the idea of “spotlights.” She’s working on snapshots for success, to talk about what’s right with our public schools. If board members do not share success stories, who will?

Closing the achievement gap is a major CSBA goal. Test data has shown that many of our Latino, black, American Indian students, students enrolled in county programs, and some Asian subgroups need more help to master standards. CSBA’s Student Issues Conference Groups address the achievement gap. We really want to get to CSBA’s mission, where the futures of all children are driven by their aspirations and not bounded by their circumstances—that isn’t just a statement, that’s really a goal, and it’s something we all need to work on.

There’s something new that I’m going to be doing as president. We often think of resources in terms of money, and one of the most precious resources we have is time. One of the things we found out in closing the achievement gap and increasing overall student achievement is that many kids will need the gift of more time. If we want all students to master state standards— then we must recognize that they may need different amounts of time to do so. We also want to be sure that they receive a curriculum that includes science, social science, physical education and the arts. CSBA will be creating a new task force on instructional time. It will be looking at the school day and the school year. It’s also timely because we have the implementation of the governor’s initiative on after-school programs being implemented this year. We’ll look at the extended day as well. We’re one of three state associations that NSBA has selected to look at extended-day programs.

One of the criticisms we’ve had is how many students graduate from high school in four years. Well, maybe that’s not really the question. The question is, how much time do they need? How do we provide appropriate programs in a structured format? So we will study time as a resource and make recommendations for action.

Of course, we talked about strengthening the recognition among the public of the importance of elected local board members and making sure that we’re getting our message out about our governance role. Again, going back to our mission statement, we want to make sure our local governing boards are fully vested with the means to advance the best interests of the students and the public. That’s part of our mission, and we need to make sure it’s in the forefront, because I’m not sure that there’s a clear understanding on the part of many members of the public of what our true role is.

Is there anything you’d like to add?

We don’t want to lose the fact that, even though we have a better state budget than in some years, we’re still far behind the national average in per pupil funding. The adequacy campaign, we can’t back off on that—that’s still a major issue.

There will be new challenges that will come at us from who knows where. The real key is, we want to be accountable. We want every child to succeed, but we need a multiplicity of resources and the flexibility to get them there. I look forward to working with board members as we meet these challenges together.