Williams: Replacing Mayoral Control With Elected School Boards is Not the Best Way to Shore Up Our Fragile Democracy 鈥� Or Run Schools
;)
Sharpen Up!
Sign up for our free newsletter and start your day with in-depth reporting on the latest topics in education.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 成人抖阴 Newsletter
For years, a number of researchers and analysts 鈥� myself included 鈥� have been sounding the alarm that American democracy is facing a foundational crisis. If this warning seemed overanxious in 2016 (or , or 2000), it鈥檚 now ubiquitous.
From top to bottom, our governing institutions have been significantly eroded by on the of our , the growing influence of , conservative , of governing norms, legislative processes, and a bevy of other worrying trends.
The depth and breadth of the problem are most visible at the elemental level, where the American democratic spirit is ostensibly most fervent: our thousands of school boards. These little local legislatures have been revered as cornerstones of American democracy . In theory, they provide local schools with democratically elected leadership that is maximally responsive to local needs and the public interest.
And yet, the has brought where local school board have into screaming matches with threats of violence over issues both (e.g. ) and/or (e.g. over or ). Things have gotten that the National School Boards Association , asking for the federal government to do more to protect elected local leaders from . Rather than calming the waters, this just prompted further outrage 鈥� particularly from conservative politicians in Washington, D.C. who cast it as an assault on parents鈥� free speech 鈥� and from the NSBA.
Problems like these are why, in recent decades, some major cities 鈥� places like Washington, D.C., Chicago, , and New York City 鈥� moved away from elected school boards. The idea had a three-part theory of action: 1) it makes school governance more coherent by unifying control of city schools under mayoral leadership, 2) it insulates education decision-makers from political pressure and 3) it gives mayors a reason to prioritize school funding and improvement.
The returns from this experiment have been largely encouraging. According to , Chicago schools are 鈥渄ramatically outperforming not just the other big poor districts, but almost every district in the country, at scale.鈥� Research on public schools in D.C. 鈥� 鈥� has also found .
And yet, , the mayoral control in cities has faced from a cacophony of claiming that returning public education to school board control would an elemental part of U.S. democracy 鈥� representative government at its most profoundly local level.
As the country wrestles with a national crisis of democracy, it seems odd to focus outrage and energy towards shifting local school governance from the control of elected mayors to elected school boards 鈥� precisely at a moment when school boards across the country are providing daily proof of their weaknesses as institutions.
Aside from the novelty of , there is nothing particularly exceptional about this latest spate of outrage. Remember the furor a few years ago over how the Common Core State Standards were ostensibly going to push schools to conduct mass retinal scans, promote student promiscuity and advance the cause of global communism? Sure, school board meetings are often sleepy for months 鈥� even years 鈥� but whether it鈥檚 or or or or , periodic eruptions of dysfunction are pretty much a given.
And those are just recent examples. . School boards have long been complicit, for instance, at designing and maintaining racist, inequitable structures in public education 鈥� including decades of segregated schooling. Who did Oliver Brown and his fellow plaintiffs have to sue to begin the long, slow, difficult, haphazard work of integrating American schools? . It was the same in Washington, D.C., where Spottswood Thomas Bolling . Indeed, over and over again, the required (and still regularly requires) 鈥� and appealing to a higher authority over 鈥� local school boards.
It鈥檚 a reliable rule of education politics: elected school boards are almost always most responsive to vested and/or interests in their communities. Consider, for instance, the Los Angeles Unified School District. For most of the last decade, their school board has faced criticism from experts, from community groups, and pressure from the to focus more resources on historically marginalized communities. And yet, nonetheless, the board has to away from those communities. School boards 补谤别苍鈥檛 designed to prioritize the less powerful, organized and noisy.
So 鈥� why, in light of significant educational progress in places that have experimented with other forms of school governance, is it suddenly so important to shift more power to local school boards? Notably, pushes in this direction in Chicago and . have sparked as are . In , at least, a move away from mayoral control would almost assuredly strengthen the voices of white, privileged voters 鈥� who would have a better chance of swaying the outcomes of a handful of , ward-by-ward school board elections than the citywide mayoral race.
Indeed, what constitutes a democracy? Can it really be reduced to whether the public elects a mayor or a board to run the schools? Of course not. Institutionally speaking, modern democratic governance requires choosing leaders through regular, free, and fair elections 鈥� but it also requires the expertise of civil servants and other experts chosen by those leaders. That鈥檚 why, for instance, we don鈥檛 hold a national referendum every time the Mine Safety and Health Administration wants to adjust its regulations, nor do we establish elected panels to determine how much radium is safe to drink in our water supply.
So: you should absolutely be concerned about the state of U.S. democracy. It cannot long sustain when voting rights are selectively narrowed to grant partisan advantage, or when bills with majority support in both houses of Congress are regularly filibustered dead, or when lawmakers efforts to a on the .
But if you鈥檙e looking for a way to ensure that our schools have elected leadership that鈥檚 fair, equitable and democratically accountable, school boards pretty obviously 补谤别苍鈥檛 the way to go.
Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 成人抖阴 Newsletter
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. Previously, Williams was the founding director of New America's Dual Language Learners National Work Group. He began his career as a first-grade teacher in Brooklyn. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Georgetown University, a master鈥檚 in science for teachers from Pace University, and a B.A. in government and Spanish from Bowdoin College.
