George,

The key question is: Are elected school boards effective and responsive? Because elected school boards are by far the most common governing body of local public schools, scholars have had ample opportunities to research that question. Although few have used that opportunity, the political scientists whose findings I have discovered [See addendum, below] have been unanimous in concluding that local elected school boards are neither effective nor responsive.

The main governance task of elected school boards is to provide policy leadership. Political scientists have concluded they do not provide effective policy leadership. Instead, having executed their main administrative task, which is hiring a school superintendent, they typically become subservient to the policy guidance of the superintendent. Elected school board members also have been ineffective in dealing with state politics, especially the need for state aid for education. The main effectiveness of elected school board members tends to be in constituent service, facilitating solving problems for parents and individual students.

As for responsiveness, the main conclusion of political scientists is that several flaws are dominant. First, elected school board members tend to be responsive to special interests, such as teachers unions and business organizations. Second, elected school board members once in office are rarely defeated for re-election, being even more difficult to dislodge than state legislators. Third, elected school board members often are recruited to run by current school board members who become a self-perpetuating elite.

In Charlottesville, the appointed school board system has worked satisfactorily, although it has some flaws. Overall, parents and other citizens should bear in mind some significant accomplishments, including:

Charlottesville High School was ranked in the top 1,000 high schools (no. 500) in the nation by a national magazine.

Out-of-district parents of more than 5 percent of students in the city schools pay tuition for the privilege of their children attending city schools, some choosing city schools because of outstanding arts programs. This percentage of out-of-district attendees may be the largest for any central city school system in the U.S.

A smaller achievement gap between white and African-American students in city elementary schools than in Albemarle County schools occurred in 2004-2005, with the gap small enough in some elementary schools to suggest that focused effort may be paying off.

Energy should be devoted in the strategic planning processes in the city schools and by the City of Charlottesville to discovering which policies are working and which are not working in reducing the achievement gap, while also emphasizing that the many strengths of the city schools should be enhanced. These efforts should include consideration of curriculum innovations, not just greater cleverness in "teaching to the test."

The elected school board referendum is a diversion from this important work. The effort that goes into recruiting, supporting, and campaigning for school board candidates in an election in May 2006 will be a further diversion from the issues that should be addressed.

William Lucy (Electronic Mail, October 30, 2005)

Political Scientists Comments about Elected School Boards

Are elected school boards effective and responsive? In what sense are they effective and to whom do they tend to be responsive?

The literature I have found compares elected school boards against the author's standards of school boards' policy making capacity and responsiveness, typically making judgments about the relative influence of school superintendents, interest groups, bureaucracies, and school boards. In these comparisons, elected school boards usually have been found to be ineffective, exercising very little policy leadership, dominated by school superintendents or interest groups, such as business organizations and teachers unions. Sometimes school board members facilitate individuals' access to school services. Sometimes they advocate positions of the interest groups that support them. In the following report, I will quote from the academic literature, mainly by political scientists.

These questions could be analyzed with results of before and after studies about school boards that have changed from appointed to elected, or the reverse. They also could be studied by comparing numerous school boards differing in being appointed or elected, as well as in other respects, such as having partisan or nonpartisan elections and jurisdiction-wide or ward elections. I have not found accounts of studies that used these analytical formats.

Kenneth F. Wong, University of Chicago, "Political Institutions and Educational Policy," in Gregory J. Cizek, ed., Handbook of Educational Policy (New York: Academic Press, 1998).

"The existence of thousands of autonomous districts can be justified by three widely held views in the literature. First, district autonomy is embedded in strongly held public beliefs in democratic control over schools. The fact that there are thousands of local school systems operating their own budgets and (310) electing their own boards testifies to the pervasive influence of the tradition of local control….(311).

"Taking a critical view of local control, Robert Wagner Jr. (1992), a former president of the New York City Board of Education, warned that 'local control of education is out of control.' Wagner argued that school boards should avoid micromanagement and focus more on setting policy. Going even farther, Chester Finn (1992), a former Reagan administration official in charge of educational research, has called for the abolition of local school boards. He sees local control as 'a legacy of our agrarian past' and no longer an appropriate governing tool for the high-tech future. Finn has characterized this middle management as superfluous and dysfunctional because it is largely detached from the interests of the clients and the taxpaying public. Instead, the board is seen as dominated by various service-provider interest groups, particularly the teachers unions (311)."

"Over time, local school governance came to be characterized by a strong executive-weak board arrangement. At the top of the central bureaucracy is the school superintendent, who assumes the educational, managerial, and fiscal responsibilities of the entire district….When allocating resources, the lay school board becomes merely 'an agent of legitimation' (Kerr 1964), following the recommendations made by professional administrators 312)."

"In response to the ineffectiveness of local school councils and an insulated bureaucracy, a new framework of educational governance is gaining prominence in urban districts across the nation (315)."

"Mayoral control of urban school systems constitute one prominent form of integrated governance. Several mayors have taken control over urban schools or have begun seeking power from state legislatures to do so. Examples include Cleveland, Baltimore, and Boston, among others. The best example of integrated governance is Chicago, where mayoral control in the last 2 years provides the most detailed information on this new model…Integrated governance reduces competing authorities and coordinates activities in support of systemwide policy goals. Integrated governance in Chicago is characterized by the following:

Mayoral appointment of board members and top administrators.

Elimination of competing sources of authority, such as the School Board Nominating Commission and the School Finance Authority…

Creation of the position of chief executive officer (CEO) that oversees the top administrative team, including the chief education officer.

…Further, integrated governance is designed to facilitate policy coherence and improve organizational collaboration among major actors. As a result of the 1995 reform, the board, top administration, and the mayor's office are closely linked by appointment decisions emanating from the mayor's office (316)."

Clarence N. Stone, Jeffrey R. Henig, Bryan D. Jones, and Carol Pierannunzi, Building Civic Capacity: The Politics of Reforming Urban Schools (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001).

"For their part, board of education members seem much more engaged in constituency service than in general policy formulation and oversight. For this reason, they sometimes back into a general policy stance…School boards can, of course, serve as channels for the expression of voter sentiments. But, as part-time officeholders with little or no legislative staff, members of school boards have limited knowledge about school operations and about actual or potential consequences of policy alternatives. School board members appear to have policy significance when they speak for an organized coalition, and, in these circumstances, it is the coalition they represent rather than institutional position that appears to be the guiding policy force.

"This finding about the relatively peripheral role of school boards is surprising. First, it runs counter to at least some normative visions about democracy and education, which place the elected school board in a pivotal role as the linchpin between voters and school policies. Second, it appears to run counter to the findings of some past empirical studies that attributed a major role to school boards….(80) (on school integration).

"At first glance, too, our conclusion that school boards are not central to civic mobilization around reform appears at odds with some of our own empirical findings. Our interviews with general influentials, education specialists, and community advocates revealed that respondents consider school boards to be visible educational 'players,' and our case studies uncovered instances in which communities exhibited an intense burst of attention on school boards, sometimes culminating in the election of reform-oriented slates…(81)."

"Our explanation for the apparent disjunction between this and our finding that the boards tend not to be central to reform mobilization involves the distinction between general activity and visibility, on the one hand, and incorporation (81) into a working reform partnership on the other. School board members play highly active roles in many of our cities, but their activity and visibility tend to be tied to much narrower issues that the broad system reform focus…Often, the board is the key access point for parents seeking input on relations that are school-specific…or even child-specific…On broad policy initiatives, they lack the staff and information to challenge the superintendent's leadership;, and as a result they tend to follow the superintendent's policy leadership except when issues become highly visible and controversial (82)."

"To the consternation of many superintendents, school board acquiescence on issues of broad policy guidance does not necessarily translate into a reluctance to micromanage narrow issues on which the board members, or their constituents, take special interest. As mentioned, communities occasionally do mount broad reform movements that center on board elections,…These short-term bursts in school board centrality do not contradict our general conclusion that school boards tend to be marginal actors in systemic school reform coalitions. Rather, they highlight the senses in which civic mobilization must be sustained over time if actors are to develop the links and sense of mutual trust that enable them to work cooperatively on issues of broad significance (82)."

"Assessing the level of civic mobilization across eleven cities, we see several general points to bear in mind. One is that there is substantial variation among cities. In particular, the role of business and the role of the teachers' union differ greatly from city to city. But there are also some general considerations that hold across all cities. School boards, appointed and elected alike, are not centers of institutional strength. That position is occupied by school superintendents and the administrative staffs they manage. School boards can hire and fire superintendents, but they have little mastery of the inner workings of the education bureaucracy and spend much of their energy on constituency service rather than matters of devising and overseeing policy direction. Professional expertise and command of operational detail give all bureaucracies some autonomy, but education bureaucracies have for many years enjoyed a higher degree of autonomy than most (85)."

"We might,.., turn to a third factor-the position of the school system in the formal structure of local governance. Some theories about school reform hold that structural changes introduced during the Progressive Era-changes designed to buffer school decision making from the patronage politics seen to permeate the general arena of city government-may have become part of the problem. These theories suggest that one way to stimulate a stronger systemic reform response is to bring school governance more formally into alignment with the institutions that govern funding and decision making across the rest of the local policy agenda. One way to do this is to give the mayor greater control over the membership of the school board. Another strategy is to increase the authority of the mayor and council to set school funding levels and review line-item allocations. (93)."

",…the office of mayor can be a critical force to focus attention on school performance and to rally forces for improvement. Some of the impact of mayoral leadership in Boston and Baltimore has come after the period of field study (post-1994), but it is generally consistent with the Chicago experience, in which mayoral leadership has been a significant factor in school reform. The Chicago experience, however, also points to the key role that business can play in creating a climate for school reform (94)."

"One institutional reform that has begun to receive substantial attention is the idea of increasing the mayoral role in education decision making. Chicago is the case that has received the most attention, but the phenomenon is much more widespread. Among the eleven cities we studied, Boston, Detroit, and the District of Columbia have moved aggressively in this direction. Baltimore has long assigned the mayor to a major role in selecting the school board. In many respects, this movement can be seen as a reaction against the Progressive reformers' early-twentieth-century efforts to buffer schools from political meddling. During that era, elected mayors were regarded skeptically by reformers, who saw them as machine-based practitioners of patronage and cronyism. Today the image of the urban mayor is on the upswing, and contemporary reformers see these pragmatic and tough-minded leaders as likely allies in their effort to bring the education bureaucracy to heel (163)."

"Opponents of this new emphasis on mayoral leadership portray it as an attack on elected school boards and suggest that it constitutes an assault on democracy. This was the case, for example, in the June 2000 special referendum in the District of Columbia, which abolished the existing ward-based school board for a smaller body in which nearly half of the members were to be mayoral appointments. Although the reform passed, it did so narrowly, and voting patterns revealed a stark polarization of the vote along racial lines. African Americans saw the (163) proposal as an outgrowth of congressional efforts to diminish local home rule and voted accordingly (164)."

"We are in general sympathetic to the new emphasis on mayoral leadership. It is ironic that separately elected school boards, which were put into place as a way to insulate schools from politics, are now sometimes seen as the seadbed of democracy. In reality, school boards are often highly politicized, with the seats used as 'stepping stones' to higher office. The result is that school boards can come to reflect the most narrow forms of politics-casework that caters to individual parent wants or concessions to highly organized interests such as teachers' unions. In our research, we found very little indication that school boards were serving as an effective focal point for shaping a broad public agenda. And,.., we believe that civic capacity demands a central place for politics and formal governmental authority (164)."

"Nonetheless, we think that it can be a mistake to invest too much in the role of a particular leader or formal position of authority, just as it can be a mistake to invest too much in any particular substantive reform. As we see it, the question is not mayoral leadership or not. The real question is whether they mayor's leadership is part of a substantial civic coalition. If it is not, there are dangers that the mayor may be more interested in the school system as a source of patronage or a useful screen upon which to project an image of activism. Even if a mayor is sincerely committed to investment and improvement in city schools, translating good intentions into stable initiatives will be problematic without a civic base. Hence, mayoral leadership is not a quick managerial fix, nor is it necessarily a means to impose accountability. The mayor's potential contribution depends on the larger picture (164)."

Michael N. Danielson and Jennifer Hochschild, Changing Urban Education: Lessons, Cautions, Prospects, in Changing Urban Education, Clarence N. Stone, ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

",…unlike most other local functions, public education is rarely an integral part of the general governmental structure. Schools either have their own governance structure and financing, or, as is the case with most of the urban systems examined in this volume, are connected to the local government through distinctive arrangements for the selection of school board members and for financing (278)."

"Partly due to these unusual structural arrangements, the education establishment typically has enjoyed more autonomy than have other governmental functions. Schools are most insulated from the usual government controls over policy, personnel, and financing when they are organized as independent districts with their own electoral and tax base. But school systems have considerable freedom of action even when school boards are appointed and financing is controlled by local elected officials. Most citizens consider politics to be incompatible with education…Thus the belief that schools and politics should not mix has throughout the twentieth century served to insulate schools from politicians even beyond the separation implied by the formal arrangements (278)."

"Educators and their supporters have capitalized on these beliefs and structures to insist that schools be the province of specially trained teachers and administrators, thereby producing relatively closed systems in which professional educators control most aspects of school policy. Within this professionalized world, school superintendents and other central administrative officials have consolidated power at the top, particularly in large urban districts. Ironically, school boards, which are formally authorized to set policy and to be the instrument for holding the professionals accountable to the citizenry, rarely are an independent or significant force in urban school politics. In the eleven-city study,.., school boards generally were nonplayers, except on the few occasions when a coalition mobilized to elect school board members as a means of advancing a particular cause…Normally, however, urban school boards are relegated (278) to peripheral roles such as servicing constituents and ratifying policy decisions made by superintendents (279)."

"Much of what emerges from this volume is not very encouraging for the larger issues of democracy, representation, accountability, and equal opportunity. Schools are supposed to be a democratizing institution, but public education is an uninspiring role model for young minds. School boards are presumably the instruments of democracy, but they seldom fostered citizen participation or attended to the educational interests of the community. Instead, they typically were captured by insiders, focused on constituency service or patronage, and had little influence on significant school policies. Only in opposition to desegregation did school boards' representative role usually come to the forefront, as responsive boards dampened integration efforts in Charlotte, Yonkers, and San Francisco (293)."

"The ironies continue: local control is supposed to empower parents and community residents who have the interests of children at heart, but it is mostly a fiasco for the poor and minority communities who are among its intended beneficiaries. Fewer than 10 percent of residents bother to vote in local school board elections in cities that have experimented with decentralization. School-based management committees in Chicago and elsewhere have often been captured by small cliques-sometimes committed parents and community activists, more often school insiders or predators eager to exploit the schools for their own benefit (293)."

"What has gone wrong? In the final irony, democratically based demands,.., have been muffled by the desire to keep politics out of education. Parents often do not think of themselves as legitimate interveners in the professional realm of education, and school insiders do their utmost to limit parental involvement to bake sales and checking homework. Mayors generally have steered clear of education, rarely been punished electorally for ignoring failing city schools, and get involved primarily to advance ((293) their political interests (294)."

"We are sorry to conclude,.., that the most powerful message emerging from these studies is that given the configuration of local political forces, there are no clear rules about how to create, sustain, or motivate either educational reform from below or the pursuit of national goals from above (294)."

Clarence N. Stone, Introduction: Urban Education in Political Context, in Changing Urban Education, Clarence N. Stone, ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998).

"Reformers have a strong tendency to focus on what should be, and they often have great skill in showing why an alternative set of practices would be better than what is in place. But they frequently fail to pay attention to political context-to the relationships that are necessary to establish and sustain a body of practices. Accountability, for example, is a widely appealing principle. It seems unlikely to operate in practice, however, unless educators come to internalize it as part of how they go about their work. This internalization seems most likely if a diverse body of stakeholders plays an active and at least partly informal role of oversight and if educators believe that they are receiving the kind of support that will enable them to succeed. Accountability, then, is less a mechanical process that can be imposed on unwilling subjects than a frame of mind to be shared by practitioners and by an attentive and involved set of stakeholders. That sharing, in short, manifests a performance regime in operation (17)."

Joseph G. Weeres and Bruce Cooper, "Public Choice Perspectives on Urban Schools," in The Politics of Urban Education in the United States, James G. Cibulka, Rodney J. Reed, and Kenneth K. Wong, eds. (Washington, D.C.: The Falmer Press, 1992).

"Where market controls are strong, boards and administrators must design policies responsive to collective community needs or risk the loss of taxpayers. At the same time, affluent citizens are less compelled to demand governmental response to personal needs because many of these can be satisfied privately (62)."

"Moderate market controls produce more politicized boards. Attenuation of the exit option allows boards and administrators greater flexibility to construct school delivery packages divergent from the (hypothetical) collective district interest. This latitude provides different groups of citizens with opportunities to shift district policy toward their special preferences. This slack, coupled with a propensity of middle-class citizens to participate, leads to unstable board majorities, because after one special interest shifts policy off-centre to their advantage another will mobilize to turn it in their direction. Ethnic and socio-economic heterogeneity magnify the tendency toward circular social choice (62)."

"Weak market controls and low participation permit boards to develop political machine-like characteristics. Where citizens cannot easily exit and do not have the resources to monitor their agents, board members can engage in friends-and-neighbours government. In education, external regulatory controls mitigate these tendencies (62)."

"Normatively, public choice theory can inform the debate about educational reform by specifying the conditions under which markets function effectively. Hirschman (1986) has pointed out that the appropriateness of market solutions depends on the presence of four conditions: (1) there are differences in preference that are widely recognized as equally legitimate; (2) citizens generally are knowledgeable about the quality of services and can evaluate and compare them; (3) purchasers can move freely from one supplier to the next, and can learn from experience; and (4) there are many competing providers (67)."

"Designing an institutional governance structure for education that simultaneously satisfies these four conditions will be a severe challenge to reformers…as we saw during out analysis of suburban school politics, even modest market inefficiencies produce relatively severe untoward effects on school politics in middle and lower income communities, effects which perhaps institutionally reinforce the association between school district socio-economic status and school achievement. The success of efforts to reshape urban school governance around the concepts of greater choice and voice will depend as much on the ingenuity of reformers in scotching market failure as in designing new avenues for access and participation (67)."

Richard D. Bingham, State and Local Government in an Urban Society (New York: Random House, 1986).

"Given the importance of education in the public's mind, one would expect to find numerous political studies of school district government. Yet this is not the case. Political scientists have traditionally directed their attention toward the more (405) obviously political institutions, such as parties and legislatures. The systematic study of the governance of education really did not begin until the publication of the seminal study, Governing American Schools (L. Harmon Zeigler and M. Kent Jennings with G. Wayne Peak, Governing American Schools: Political Interaction in Local School Districts, 1974). Zeigler and Jennings were the first investigators to look at the politics of local education on a nationwide basis (406)."

"The 'typical' board members are male, white, middle aged, well educated, have prestigious occupations, are Republicans, and are long-term residents of their communities. Not only are they nonrepresentative in this regard, but they come from 'educational' families-over half have relatives in the education profession (406)."

"The fact that the characteristics of board members are so similar immediately suggests that there very little competition for office. And, in fact, the incumbency advantage for board members is enormous-even higher than for state legislators-although as districts consolidate and urban populations change, the power of incumbency is slowly being reduced (406)."

"School board members are recruited in much the same way as are members of other special districts. School boards try to perpetuate themselves-to select members of 'like' mind." Zeigler and Jennings found that approximately half of the board members in their survey first gained office either through appointment or after being recruited to seek office by other school board members. What we have is a governing system composed of a consciously self-perpetuating elite (406)."

"Zeigler and Jennings essentially discovered that school boards have largely ceased to exercise their policy-making functions. They merely legitimate the policy recommendations of school superintendents. There are a number of reasons for this. As William Boyd of the University of Rochester points out:

"As school districts have become larger and the process and organization of schooling has become more complex, school boards have had to turn more and more of the actual administration and policy-making for the schools over to trained educators (407). Moreover, school boards composed of laypersons serving on a part-time basis have found themselves increasingly dependent on their full-time professional school administrators for advice, recommendations, and information about the schools and education in general. As a result, boards have become inclined to defer to the expertise of the administrative staff (408)."

"One issue that has traditionally created conflict between school boards and administrators is school desegregation. Boards have generally favored the status quo-that is, opposed school desegregation orders-while superintendents have been more willing to acquiesce to the courts (408)."

Research findings about the political behavior of local elected councilors may provide some insights about elected school board members, by analogy, although no such claim is made in the following book by Thomas P. Murphy and John Rehfuss, Urban Politics in the Suburban Era (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1976).

"There are two general views of how individuals are recruited to run for public office. One suggests that persons seek out public office for a variety of personal reasons such as a concern for city problems, a drive for power or prestige, or an honest motivation to serve the community (56)."

"The other view of the local electoral process generally holds that the party, interest groups, friends, and neighbors 'pull' most candidates into office seeking. Most people require some strong stimulus to commit themselves to a campaign, and this stimulus is usually the urging of a party, the 'call' of a city caucus, or the encouragement of friends and neighbors. Two actual studies seem to suggest that environmental stimuli are crucial to encouraging candidacy. About two thirds of all councilmen from the Illinois and San Francisco Bay Areas indicated that some group or individual was involved in their decision to run (56)."

"The study in metropolitan San Francisco indicated that many councilmen seem to observe an 'ethic of volunteerism.' (Kenneth) Prewitt found that electoral control over city councilmen was severely limited by the following events: (1) only about one third of the citizens voted, so that members often were elected by small numbers of voters; (2) nearly 24 percent of all councilmen initially had been appointed to their seat (the Illinois sample showed 12 percent); (3) incumbents rarely were defeated, with over 80 percent successfully standing for reelection; and (4) many councilmen plan to retire voluntarily after one or two terms. These factors form an ethic of volunteerism that undermines the importance of elections and of electoral accountability (57)."

"The attitude of 'I serve for nothing; I will follow my conscience rather than citizen demands' prevails, with obvious consequences for electoral accountability. Prewitt found that the members of those councils with the greatest degree of volunteerism were most likely to acknowledge voting against majority public opinion. They were also the least likely to involve constituencies in policymaking or to sense demands from the public. He cited other studies that suggested that the combination of trusteeship in representation, ritualism in elections, and volunteerism is potentially dangerous to democratic control at the local level. Popular controls are certainly weak when councilmen exhibit volunteerism, behave as trustees acting in a paternalistic fashion 'for' the citizens, and are elected at ritualistic elections with small turnout where incumbents almost always win."

Murray Stedman, Jr., Urban Politics. (Cambridge: Winthrop Publishers, 1972).

".., (reformers) were not able to resolve one of the basic problems, namely, the local school board itself….The school board had to enter more and more into active political alliances to get more money. Yet at the same time local boards continued to insist on their historic autonomy. Thus, the boards often became paralyzed with indecision and ineffectiveness (207)."

"In The Politics of Schools, (Robert) Bendiner…noted the problem closest to the heart of public education was the relationship between the superintendent and the board,...The basic question today is whether the boards themselves are suitable instruments for dealing with the great current problems facing public education: such as finance, unionization of teachers, and the racial balance of student populations (207)."

"Bendiner concluded, from his evidence that: '…in three major aspects (those above) all vital to public education, the American school board has reached a point where what was mere inadequacy has come close to total helplessness,…(207)."

William Lucy (electronic mail, October 27, 2005)