Before a school system can initiate reform, it has to know where it presently stands, and to effectively implement change, it must be a healthy organization, according to a researcher in Auburn University's College of Education. Dennis Sabo, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Technology, is gathering data from elementary, middle and high schools across Alabama to measure the health of their organizations. Sabo describes assessing an organization's health as examining a variety of organizational dimensions, such as leadership, teacher trust in the principal and among themselves, institutional integrity and decision making.
Healthy organizations have healthy relationships.
Decision-making is shared and viewed as necessary in order to reach organizational goals, Sabo added. To eliminate bias, Sabo collects the data himself and develops a school profile. He then provides it to the school in a usable form for identifying strengths as well as possible barriers. The data provide a snapshot of the school's readiness for change and this picture is shared with the entire school staff. Improved test scores for students is one important way to measure reform.