Problems in American Education - Part 9: Boards of Education and the Question of Local Autonomy

I have worked under the Boards of Education system for well over 30 years and I think that the system stinks. Let’s start with a little background and then examine how things have evolved over the years.

If you were to ask most people why Boards of Education (called School Committees and other names in difference places) exist, I think that most would tell you that they are part of the American system of checks and balances under the Constitution. Wrong. Boards of Education were not envisioned by the founding fathers. Actually, the Constitution indicates that responsibility for education should fall under the auspices of state governments. Why then, you may ask, does every state in the union save one (Hawaii) delegate that Constitutional responsibility to local towns, cities, and regions and keep for themselves only the role of monitoring what the localities do and administering guideline regulations for education in their states? In the interest of accuracy, it should be indicated that some of these regulations are quite stringent and that they force localities to follow paths prescribed by the states; but the actual day-to-day, year-to-year, exercise of administrative authority over most schools is done by the Boards of Education and falls under the resources provided by budgets supported by local property taxes.

I think that there are two reasons that American education has evolved in this direction and away from state control over the years. One of them is that there is a basic American distrust of bureaucracy and Americans perceive state departments of education as classic examples of bureaucracies, subject to the excesses and inefficiencies of bureacracies. Secondly, and, I am afraid, more insidiously, local control is a way for people to geographically segregate where the money goes and allows them to channel that money to where it will help their own children. It takes the reasoned premise that all children should be given an equal opportunity to resources and replaces it with the premise posed earlier that some parents feel that their accomplishments, power, and money should be transmitted on the local level to the reality that their children (who, in most cases, have never earned a nickel of money that supports education) should enjoy the benefits of their parents’ success in life. Granted, laws have been passed in an attempt to mitigate the effects of this practice; but, to this day, the phrase “ability to pay” is still a key phrase in understanding American education localities, especially in the dichotomy of offerings between urban and suburban education.

In breaking it down further, even if you accept that this is the way things should be, what is the report card for Boards of Education in their attempts to exercise local autonomy. After working over these many years with many, many different Boards, here is what I have seen and experienced. When the mode of approach has been to push money at educational issues, I have observed some successes, especially in communities where money is available and where the citizenry has enough children in their population to want the best. Other times, however, what I have seen are:

- highly questionable approaches to problem solution;

- attempts by Boards to forget their roles as child advocates and fall prey to the political pressure to act more like Boards of Finance;

- successful candidacies for membership on the Boards by people who have personal vendettas and become one-issue members;

- a failure by many Boards to treat their professional educators as respected professional advisers and, instead, a tendency to allow their personal biases to play a greater role in decision-making than research and the opinions of people who have been trained to understand educational issues;

- a susceptiblity of some members on Boards of Education to relate more to cronyism than the best interests of children, leading to problems related to nepotism and issuance of “favors,” especially in hiring practices; and,

- a tendency to be swayed by local political interest groups, many of whom provide candidates for future elections.

While I understand the concern about state bureaucratic influence, the question has to be whether the state could do much worse than what I have outlined above. We question and complain about where American education is going, yet we fail to recognize that it is on the local levels where most significant decisions about education are being made, at least as they effect individual schools. Why do we fail to understand the answer to that question? Go back to my second reason for the maintainance of local autonomy, the one I called “insidious,” and you will see the reason we turn our heads while vociferously complaining. Other than that judge in Boston a number of years ago and a few other limited measures that have been attempted in several staes, we fail to act because too many people believe that it is not in their self-interest to act. The solution, they believe, creates a bigger problem, even if it is a just solution. Rather, they pinch their noses and tolerate the smell.