SOC-Edu-0023-Stock

School boards govern school districts. That raises two linked questions: the desirability of boards as a form of governance and of districts as a way to organize schooling. Reform proposals routinely ignore this second question. This is a mistake, and it complicates governance challenges with organizational ones. That said, let's start by presuming that, for the moment, districts are a fact of life. The question is how they ought to be governed. Advocates of mayoral control, such as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have suggested that mayoral control is a precondition for serious school improvement.

I have sympathy for such claims. Especially in dysfunctional, troubled, big-city school systems, I have previously argued, "Urban school districts are so hidebound, school boards frequently so tangled in distractions, and coherence and patience so absent from the organizational DNA that handing the reins over to an active, engaged, and accountable mayor may be the better bet" (Hess 2008). But all districts are not big-city school systems. At most, a hundred--less than 1%--of the nation's 14,000 districts are in big cities. Yet, as is so often the case, we risk allowing a few well-known examples to fuel a rush toward one-size-fits-all policy making. So, let's consider the merits of school boards and mayoral control. The truth is that the benefits of mayoral control are not uniform; they vary with context. Indeed, elected boards have real strengths, and these ought not to be discounted--in some cases, these outweigh the problems of board governance, and in some they do not.

The Frailties of School Boards

There are at least four fairly damning critiques of school boards that are frequently offered. All are, to greater or lesser degrees, legacies of the Progressive Era effort to separate education governance from politics. In fact, most calls for mayoral control or appointment suppose that school governance is hampered not by too much politics, but by the wrong kind of politics or by too little disciplined political leadership. The four indictments are familiar, but that doesn't make them any less compelling.

First, a lack of voter attention makes it difficult for voters to hold their representatives accountable. Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Lisa Graham Keegan have observed, "The romantic notion that local school boards are elected by local citizens has been replaced with the reality that these elections are essentially rigged. They are held at odd times, when practically nobody votes except those with a special reason to do so" (2004: 15). Sixty-two percent of superintendents and 69% of board members themselves agree that school board meetings are "dominated by people with special interests and agendas" (Farkas, Foley, and Duffett 2001: 15). It's hard to count on elections to keep public officials in line when the public doesn't know who's in office. Public Agenda has reported that 63% of adults, and 50% of parents, say they can't name their local superintendent and that 62% of adults, and 48% of parents, couldn't name one member of the local school board. As Public Agenda explains, "Most people, for whatever reason, are simply not active in or mindful of school affairs on a routine basis" (Farkas, Foley, and Duffett 2001: 15).

Second, electoral apathy allows mobilized constituencies, especially teachers unions, to exert disproportionate influence. Based on a national survey of more than 500 school districts, I reported with David Leal a few years ago, "teachers unions are generally the leading interest group in local school board politics, that influence is greater in larger, more urbanized districts" (Hess and Leal 2005: 249). Stanford professor Terry Moe has documented union success in electing favored candidates in California. He finds that school board candidates endorsed by the union win 76% of the time, while others win just 31% of the time (Moe 2005: 273). Because school boards govern the school system and oversee contract negotiations with unions, unions are helping to select their ostensible bosses. This has been blamed for lethargic district leadership, a failure to challenge union prerogatives, and problematic personnel practices (Hess and West 2006).

Third, elected boards have been blamed for a lack of coherence, discipline, and continuity. Shifting membership, concern with public perception, and the desire to placate restive communities by showing rapid improvement mean that superintendents are under tremendous pressure to produce short-term results and earn their keep. With more than a quarter of board members serving in their first term, no party ties to bind members together, and a need to assemble enough free agents to create a stable board majority after each election, it's not surprising that the firing and hiring of superintendents has become something akin to a ritual (Hess 1999). It's an easy way to cleanse bad blood or signal a fresh start. Don McAdams, director of the Center for Reform of School Systems, has observed that "more often than not, school board members are not certain what they are supposed to do--reflect or shape public opinion, micromanage, or act as a rubber stamp" (2006: 65).

Finally, school boards operate in isolation from the mayor and the city's political and civic leadership. Two decades ago, the Institute for Educational Leadership fretted that school boards had ceased to attract members with political clout and lacked firm links to local leaders or city government (Danzberger 1986). While mayors have the ability to coordinate among municipal departments and frequently carry significant weight with the local business community, civic leadership, and state government, school district leaders lack such resources. Many of the supposed frailties of boards aren't caused by democratic governance, but by the anachronistic structure of the school district itself. Mayors are far better positioned to build broad, citywide coalitions of interests, rally business and civic groups, and counter the fragmented politics of urban schooling. However, "mayors and governors are not beyond the reach of the same organized interests that have retarded reform on local school boards" (Viteritti 2005: 321).

The Strengths of School Boards

School boards possess certain natural strengths.There are at least four advantages of the familiar school board.

First, while we've embraced a relentless focus on graduation rates and student performance on state assessments as the dominant gauges of school performance, it's far from clear that all communities--or even a majority of parents and voters--are truly on board. Even a decade after NCLB, there is much evidence that the middle-class, suburban, and affluent don't believe those measures are the most reliable measures of the schools that their own children attend. Indeed, we have a long tradition of expecting educators to provide music and art instruction, teach children shared social norms, and so on, and our accountability systems are not configured to oversee these other roles.

Also, deciding how to distribute services fairly and equitably is often less a management than a policy decision, and one that might benefit from democratic input. In education, more than in most areas of public policy, there is far-reaching disagreement. Rather than simply disagreeing about the size, scope, or location of public services, we sometimes disagree about the very nature of the service we wish to provide. In such cases, we look to democratic bodies to ensure that different voices get heard, the marginalized have someone to appeal to, and different concerns get weighed.

Second, school boards provide transparency. The fates of private firms from AIG to Lehman Brothers have shown how overly clubby boards and a lack of external examination can enable management to take shortcuts, cook the books, or adopt practices that don't serve the interests of clients or customers (see Shaub et al. 2005). A key goal of corporate governance reform following the dot-com and derivative bubbles has been to weaken the grip of executives and increase the presence of independent voices on boards of directors.

Elected boards are well-suited for this openness. Appointed boards make it easier for politically self-conscious mayors and superintendents to control data, limit accountability, and reduce opportunities for citizen input. The members of appointed boards may be reluctant to ask uncomfortable questions. It would be ironic to disregard such concerns in an era when corporate America is wrestling with the problems that cloistered management invites.

Third, elected boards give all voices the opportunity to be heard. In urban districts, elected members too often violate the norms of effective boards, but frequently they do so in an attempt to address real concerns. Personal conflicts and micromanagement often reflect real disputes over resource allocation or real disagreement about the school system's direction. Under various versions of mayoral control, some voices are likely to be silenced or marginalized.

Finally, despite the widespread complaints about board dysfunction and micromanagement, it's not clear that most superintendents see boards as the hindrance that popular critiques suggest. For instance, 87% of superintendents confidentially describe their relationship with the local board as "mostly cooperative" and just 6% as "mostly contentious." Similarly, board members describe their relation with the superintendent as mostly cooperative rather than mostly contentious by a 77% to 10% margin. More than 70% of superintendents report that no more than "one or two" board members tend to "represent the views of specific, narrow constituencies" (Farkas, Foley, and Duffett 2001: 11). So, boards may be troublesome in some locales, but the vast majority of superintendents seem satisfied with existing governance arrangements.

Weighing Governance Reform

In weighing the merits of governance reform, we must understand that governance is not a strategy that improves schooling. Rather, some forms of governance can create the conditions in which improvement is more likely. What will create those conditions will vary from one district to the next, just as it varies from one company, nonprofit, or community organization to the next. There exists in the world no scientifically validated "best" model of governance; there exist only arrangements that work better or worse for certain purposes, in certain contexts, and at certain times. Those who want more certainty ought to start by proving whether the British, Japanese, or the American system is a "better" form of government.

Rather than asking whether school boards are "good" or "bad," asking what problem needs to be solved would be more useful. In large urban districts plagued by incoherence, leadership turnover, and petty strife, mayoral control seems to offer substantial benefits in those places where the mayor welcomes the authority and is eager to be judged on stewardship of the schools. Where the problem of petty board politics is less pressing, where the need for reform seems less dire, or where communities are broadly satisfied with achievement and more focused on other dimensions of schooling, the benefits of school boards are clearer. And mayoral enthusiasts should not dismiss legitimate concerns that reform-minded mayors may "go native" or be followed by successors for whom schooling is a much lower priority.

Reconsidering the District

Debating governance reform or the merits of mayoral control may be all too narrow a response to the challenge of crafting school systems equal to today's challenges. After all, even the "radical" challenge of mayoral control leaves untouched the assumption that schools should be governed by a series of contiguous bureaucratic monopolies. Many of the supposed frailties of boards aren't caused by democratic governance, but by the anachronistic structure of the school district itself.

School districts were institutionalized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a time when travel and communication technologies that we take for granted didn't yet exist. In 1900, just 8,000 automobiles were registered nationwide (Mowery and Rosenberg 1999: 50), and just 17 out of every 1,000 people had access to a telephone (Eakle and Cerny 1984: 388). While our districts have grown through consolidation since then, their shapes, norms, and roles are the products of an era when coordinating and overseeing teaching and learning from a distance of even 50 miles would have been costly and difficult and when there was no sensible alternative to geographically compact school systems.

Having all-purpose operations focus on serving a given geographic community was common in the early 20th century and hardly unique to schooling. But that's no longer the way providers in most sectors are organized. Today, the world is dotted by providers that specialize in doing a few things well. Such arrangements allow an organization to become proficient at a few core tasks, to recruit and operate accordingly, and to serve the needs of millions of geographically dispersed clients and customers.

Advances in communications, transportation, and data management technology have made it possible for one provider to oversee outlets in thousands of locations--and to offer the same specialized service in each of them. Yet, districts aren't permitted to operate in the same way. Delivering a new reading program or replacing a problematic human resources department requires sending a handful of administrators to go visit an acclaimed district for a few days, and then asking them to mimic it locally with existing staff and some consulting support.

Today, every school district is asked to devise ways to meet every need of every single child in a given area. Since they can't tailor their service to focus on certain student needs, districts are forced to try to build expertise in a vast number of specialties and services. Districts then must also become the employers of nearly all educators in a given community. They are not able to selectively hire educators who agree on mission, focus, or pedagogy. With this grab-bag of faculty, leaders must then strive to forge coherent cultures. This is needlessly exhausting work. Transforming any sprawling, underachieving organization is enormously challenging under even the best circumstances; it may well be impossible under such conditions.

Once a provider has developed the ability to solve a problem or effectively serve a population, why wouldn't we opt for arrangements that allow them to do so in more and more locales? A sensible configuration would allow providers to deliver their services (with their own staffs) directly to a growing population of students or across a range of schools and geographies. Such arrangements are made untenable by the geographic district monopoly.

A Seaworthy Ship?

School boards possess real virtues, but they also suffer from real and deep-seated problems. In troubled districts, there is a strong case to be made for a shift to mayoral control--if designed coherently, executed with an eye to transparency, and if the mayor is ready to be responsible and accountable for K-12 schooling.

More significantly, the assumptions that undergird the modern school district deserve scrutiny. The regional monopolies that we rely on today once made good sense. But today they represent an organizational strategy that makes transformative improvement prohibitive.

Changing captains during a crisis is all well and good, but more pressing is the need to ensure that the ship is still seaworthy. That question has received far too little attention in recent years, but it is one that would-be reformers can no longer afford to overlook.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI.

References

Danzberger, Jacqueline P., Michael D. Usdan, Luvern Cunningham, Lila N. Carol, Michael W. Kirst, and Barbara McCloud. School Boards: Strengthening Grass Roots Leadership. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Educational Leadership, 1986.

Eakle, Arlene, and Johni Cerny. The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy. Provo, Utah: Ancestry Publishing Company, 1984.

Farkas, Steve, Patrick Foley, and Ann Duffett. Just Waiting to Be Asked: A Fresh Look at Attitudes on Public Engagement. New York: Public Agenda, 2001.

Finn, Chester E., Jr., and Lisa Graham Keegan. "Lost at Sea." Education Next 4, no. 3 (2004): 15-17.

Hess, Frederick M. Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1999.

Hess, Frederick M. "Looking for Leadership: Assessing the Case for Mayoral Control of Urban School Systems." American Journal of Education 114 (May 2008): 219-246.

Hess, Frederick M., and David Leal. "School House Politics: Expenditures, Interests, and Competition in School Board Elections." In Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, ed. William G. Howell. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

Hess, Frederick M., and Martin R. West. A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance, 2006.

McAdams, Donald R. What School Boards Can Do: Reform Governance for Urban Schools. New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.

Moe, Terry M. "Teacher Unions and School Board Elections." In Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, ed. William G. Howell. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

Mowery, David, and Nathan Rosenberg. Paths of Innovation: Technological Change in 20th Century America. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Shaub, Michael K., Frank Collins, Oscar Holzmann, and Suzanne H. Lowensohn. "Self-Interest vs. Concern for Others: What's the Impact on Management Accountants' Ethical Decisions?" Strategic Finance 86, no. 9 (March 2005): 41-45.

Viteritti, Joseph P. "The End of Local Politics?" In Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, ed. William G. Howell. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005.

Photo Credit: iStockphoto/Bill Noll