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Executive Summary

Lay governance of public education is a uniquely American institution, with roots in the locally controlled schools of the New England colonies and in the common school movement of the mid-19th century. But despite the long history of school boards--and despite the important responsibility they bear for governing the education of our nation’s children--little statistical information has been available on these public bodies.

This report draws on the results of an extensive study to illuminate the nature of school boards and the challenges they face. A survey of board members in 2,000 school districts yielded a robust response rate of 41 percent, providing an exceptionally clear and penetrating look into the groups of men and women who govern the nation’s 14,890 school systems.

The most striking conclusion from these findings is that large-district boards are fundamentally different from their smaller, more plentiful, counterparts. In large districts (defined as those with 25,000 or more students), school boards are relatively political bodies, with more costly campaigns, more attentive interest groups, more politically oriented candidates, and more hotly contested elections. Boards in small districts, on the other hand, tend to be relatively apolitical bodies that attract little attention and feature inexpensive, often uncontested campaigns.

Some similarities between boards in smaller and larger districts are worth noting, however. No matter what kind of district they serve, today’s board members put a high priority on student achievement. Board members nationwide also contribute considerable time to school leadership, and two-thirds of them receive no pay for their work.

Such similarities aside, the concerns that predominate in large, urban districts--including school violence and teacher shortages--are less prevalent in smaller districts but are often portrayed nevertheless as national crises. This phenomenon poses a challenge for policy makers, as it appears that the public image of school boards and school systems is informed largely by the conditions that prevail in the scant 2 percent of districts that enroll 25,000 or more students. Fully grasping the nature of governance in those districts, and how those lessons may or may not apply to the other 98 percent of school districts, is central to any effort to reform school systems.

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

The full text of this paper is available here as an Adobe Acrobat PDF.