This paper reports on the results of an action research to understand the benefits, obstacles and challenges of implementing the BSC in a School District. To complete the action research cycle (see Figure 1) it is pertinent to discuss the learning made in relation to strategic management, the BSC and the area of research.
As far as the first is concerned, the analysis of results suggests that the BSC can overcome some weaknesses of Portuguese schools, in the area of strategic management (see section 2.1.), and that were already described in the literature (e.g. Estêvão et al., 1996; Costa, 2004) and the IGE (2009, 2011a, b). The evidence collected in the AEX School District corroborates the benefits of the BSC in first, promoting the articulation between the objectives included in the educative project and the activities included in the annual plan of activities; second, persuading the educational community of the need to define indicators and targets; third, providing a framework to continually assess the performance of the school district; and fourth, promoting the participation of the educational community in elaborating strategic documents of the school district, as well as a better knowledge of these documents. It should be noted that the strategic vision is the starting point in building the BSC and, therefore, schools must necessarily define their vision to be able to take advantage of this.
Regarding the BSC, it can be inferred that its implementation had mixed results. If, on the one hand, the BSC team successfully managed to mobilize the educational community for the elaboration of the strategic documents and the research was brought to a successful conclusion, on the other hand, BSC ceased to be used. After the new educative project and the annual plan of activities were approved, the BSC was not deployed to each of the school district's structures nor was its strategy monitored, assessed and revised. In fact, some months after the annual plan of activities was approved, a new school district director was elected who decided to abandon the BSC methodology. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Education decided to reorganize the school network again, having the director taken, a few days after his election as school district director, the position of president of the CAP's new school district. New strategic documents were then developed, but only a few elements produced by the BSC team remained, namely the mission, vision, values and strategic objectives. The strategy map, the four perspectives, and the BSC were not included in the documents.
In view of the above, what factors were decisive for abandoning the use of the BSC? The successive changes experienced by the school district, triggered by external factors (in this case the Ministry of Education), appear to have been an important reason. The many restructurings that occurred throughout the history of the school district, which led to successive changes in the composition of school boards and strategic documents, may have contributed to the development of a sense of disbelief and frustration in the educational community. Indeed, the results of initiatives like the BSC are quickly outdated and the work spent on them is not valued by educational authorities. Other important reasons appear to be associated with cultural and political factors. Given the recent (and controversial) reforms in the teacher evaluation system, the evidence collected suggests that there is still in the AEX School District a significant number of teachers who see with suspicion any initiatives that assess and expose their contribution to the improvement of quality of education. The relationship of the BSC with performance assessment and accountability is obvious, which may also have led the new leadership to abandon the initiative. Finally, the difficulty expressed by the educational community in understanding the managerial terms and the technical component of the BSC, as well as the difficulties in providing further training, may also have contributed to the decision. It should be noted that in relation to this aspect, the terms “indicators” and “objectives” were confused with each other in the new version of the guiding documents, which further denotes the need for additional training.
Another lesson learned in relation to the BSC is that its implementation in the AEX School District was constrained by the limits of the current levels of autonomy granted to non-higher education public schools. More specifically, the development of the educative project and the annual plan of activities had to take into account a vast wealth of scattered legislation (sometimes with little coordination between them), the strategic priorities of the Ministry of Education, the scarce resources available, and that the motivation strategies of the educational community had to be governed by the Statute of Teaching Career and the teacher evaluation system. Although these constraints do not hinder the implementation of the BSC, they raise considerable challenges to the management of public schools. All these factors together with the change in the order of the four perspectives differentiate the implementation of the BSC in the public sector of non-higher education from other sectors.
Regarding the area of research, this study has demonstrated the paucity of empirical literature to investigate the implementation of the BSC in non-higher education public schools. This paper reports one of the first action research studies with the aim of understanding the benefits, obstacles and challenges in implementing the BSC in those schools. Overall, some results are consistent with other empirical studies in higher education institutions (e.g. McDevitt et al., 2008; Umashankar and Dutta, 2007) and other conceptual studies about non-higher education schools (e.g. Storey, 2002); other results, including the benefit of increased systematization, the obstacle of the requirement of previous knowledge, and the challenge of motivating people seem to reflect contextual specificities. Although the use of the BSC was not pursued further in the AEX School District, it is expected that this study can contribute to the discussion of the implementation of the BSC in non-higher education public schools in Portugal. The management boards of these schools can use the results of this study to inform the development of strategies aimed at making the implementation of the BSC more effective.