Gene I. Maeroff's School Boards in America, A New Book

Pertinent Observations from School Boards in America

• Of all the institutions in the country with jurisdiction over large chunks of money and the ability to influence the nation’s future, boards of education are surely the most obscure and least understood.
• Taking responsibility for student learning is one of the most problematic tasks of school boards. Most states give school boards some say in this area, but what does the average citizen who serves on a school board know about curriculum and instruction?
• How many other enterprises in the United States have annual budgets of more than $560 billion? Boards of education are in a class by themselves and few citizens seem aware that these entities—controlled by a handful of their neighbors—oversee so much money. Many people don’t realize as they pay their local taxes that the greatest portion of the bill underwrites the public schools. It matters not whether a household uses those schools or ever used the schools.
• School boards are jobs machines. This is especially true in some small towns and suburbs, where the school system is a major, if not the largest, employer. School boards perform as gatekeepers in such places, opening doors to lifetime employment, pensions, and health benefits for the chosen few.
• Above all else, a school board is responsible for hiring the superintendent. Everything flows from this decision, the most important one that a school board can make. Relations between the board and the superintendent set the tone for almost everything that happens in the school system. The relationship resembles a marriage.
• Democracy is somewhat out of whack when it comes to school boards vs. teacher unions. The balance is uneven, like President Reagan’s war against Grenada.
• Mandates emerge from above, ordering school boards to offer this program or that program, to provide this or that service to students. The mandates, often unfunded by the state or federal governments or by the court that dictated them, are a sort of final indignity for school boards, further undoing their ability to determine their own destiny and forcing them to pay for programs and services that they did not freely choose to offer.
• The law forces each school board to divert a disproportionate share of its budget to disabled students. Fully 13 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren, almost 7 million, are classified as handicapped. The federal government requires school systems to spend whatever it takes to educate them even if this means less money for other students.
• All too often school boards get so tangled in thickets of minutiae that they neglect to walk the straight course that they should follow in the pursuit of solid education. And the underpinnings of democracy are weakened when students receive anything less. Such failure diminishes their life prospects. There should be no alternative to governing well.
• Democratic principles seem to demand that school boards respond to public wishes, but this is not always possible—especially when the public is divided or makes demands that are not in the best interests of the school system. People who’ve paid no attention to the local school board seem to get it in their sights quickly when a board wants to, say, rezone attendance zones feeding into particular schools or change busing policies.
• Accountability doesn’t begin and end with the board of education. Educators should be accountable for providing high quality instruction. Students should be accountable for putting forth the effort to perform to the best of their ability. Parents should be accountable for reinforcing education in the home. Taxpayers should be accountable for giving schools the fiscal capacity to do their work. School board members should interact with all of these constituencies, spending money wisely and effectively and doing all within their means to promote the best possible teaching and learning. The school board should never neglect outcomes.
• If the school board is not the proper vehicle for looking after the educational interests of a community’s children, then what is the alternative? There has been a range of other approaches across the country, though most school districts have been largely untouched by these experiments and the traditional school board has continued to carry on unimpeded with business as usual in most locales. This could mean that no place has found a better form of governance or that the weight of the status quo is just too heavy to lift.
• Whatever may happen to change governance, it is almost certain that local school boards will not vanish—even if, eventually, consolidation leaves fewer of them. By and large, the public wants local school boards and state legislators are not about to eliminate them despite the flaws. The idea of governing from the grass roots adds to the appeal that local school boards have with the public. Too many Americans would consider any other arrangement as undemocratic, however inaccurate this notion of democracy may be.