| "previous reforms as implemented—and often as originally designed—tended to focus marginally, at best, on teaching and learning improvement. For example, decentralization and site-based management initiatives generally emphasized changing the balance of authority between schools/ communities and their district central offices or the creation of school-based governance councils as main outcomes in and of themselves, not necessarily as strategies for helping schools improve teaching and learning. The development and management of these governing bodies consumed significant amounts of school staffs’ time in ways that detracted from their focus on teaching and learning matters. When they did focus on issues beyond their own processes, school site management teams by and large concentrated not on instruction but on“tertiary activities”  such as student discipline, campus aesthetics, staff responsibilities, and the distribution of funds often from small discretionary budgets." |