SOLUTION NO. 9 Public schools should be controlled by elected school boards or by boards in large cities appointed for a set term by more than one elected official.
In the past decade, reformers have sought to centralize control over education policy so that the reforms they favor may be imposed without debate or delay. They say, “We can’t wait.” They argue that school boards are obstacles to speedy reform. They want national standards, national tests, weak unions, and performance pay tied to test scores; they want the freedom to open privately managed charter schools without having to take local opinion into account; they want the freedom to close public schools without listening to the parents or communities that oppose the closing of their schools; and they want the freedom to fire teachers without being slowed down by due process or hearings.
Matt Miller, an advocate of the new reforms at the Center for American Progress, argued, not entirely facetiously, “First, kill all the school boards.”1 He recommended the nationalization of education policy as well as mayoral control of urban districts. He claimed that the elimination of school boards would make it possible to install the new reform ideas, which would promptly lift test scores and graduation rates. His view reflected the common belief among reformers that checks and balances get in the way of their preferred policies.
The United States has an unusually decentralized school system. There are about 14,000 school districts, each with its own local school board. There are 50 state school boards, plus the school boards of the District of Columbia and various territories. And there is the federal Department of Education. If this seems like a lot of decentralization, consider that in 1940 there were about 117,000 local school boards.2
Education in this nation operates on the basis of federalism. Federalism refers to a system of shared power, a balance of power among local school boards, state authorities, and the federal government. In this sharing of power, the federal government sets the basic ground rules protecting the civil rights of students but by law has no role in setting curriculum or instructional standards. Education is not mentioned in the Constitution. It has long been a state and local function. The states have primary responsibility for maintaining and funding public education. The federal government acts in a supportive role. It supplies about 10 percent of total funding; the states and localities provide the other 90 percent.
American education is a patchwork quilt, with responsibility for funding and managing education parceled out among the various jurisdictions.
The federal role in education began modestly in 1867, when the U.S. Office of Education was established to collect information about the “condition and progress of education” in the nation. This was the historic role of the federal government, to gather and publish accurate information about the schools, the students, the funding, and the programs available in the nation. In 1914 and 1917, Congress passed legislation to fund and encourage vocational and industrial education in the schools. During the Depression of the 1930s, the federal government established the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps as independent agencies to provide jobs and training for young people, but these agencies were eliminated after World War II began.
Although there were periodic efforts to pass federal aid to education, Congress did not enact it until 1965, because neither party trusted the other to control education. Each feared that the other might use its power to impose partisan ideas. The region that needed federal aid the most, because it was the poorest, was the South, but southern members of Congress wanted to avoid federal interference in their racially segregated school systems. Local control in this era meant the freedom to segregate students by race and to fund the two systems inequitably.
In 1965, Congress enacted the Elementary and Secondary Education Act at the behest of President Lyndon B. Johnson. ESEA, as it is known, is the basic framework for distributing federal aid to the schools. The primary purpose of the federal role in education, Congress then agreed, was equity for needy children. ESEA allocated federal funds to schools and districts based on the proportion of poor children enrolled in their schools. The purpose of federal aid was to grant those schools extra funding so that poor children would have smaller classes, textbooks, and the additional teachers and resources they needed. ESEA enabled the federal government to take an aggressive role in enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by threatening to withhold federal funds from districts that failed to desegregate their schools.
In 1964, Congress created Head Start—a preschool program for poor children—as part of the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. Over the years, Congress authorized many other programs for needy students, such as aid for students with disabilities. Congress initially authorized the National Assessment of Educational Progress to administer tests to national and regional samples of students, and the first assessment was offered in 1969; in 1992, NAEP began reporting the scores of states that volunteered to be assessed. Most states participated, but not all. Participation in NAEP testing did not become mandatory for all states until the passage of NCLB.
In 1979, Congress established the U.S. Department of Education. Its advocates, primarily the National Education Association, thought that education would assume greater importance and perhaps greater funding if it had a cabinet-level position. That legislation passed while President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was in office. His successor, Ronald Reagan, was not at all pleased to have a department of education.
As the federal role grew, both parties agreed that the federal government should not tell states and districts how to run their schools. Together they maintained an understanding that the department would grant financial aid but not take a directive role, other than to ensure that the money was spent in accordance with the law. A decade before the establishment of the department, Congress enacted a specific prohibition to prevent federal officials from interfering in matters of curriculum and instruction.3
Both by tradition and with respect to funding, the states are—or have been—the primary actors in providing and overseeing public education. Every state has its own laws and regulations, but most are committed by their state constitutions to provide a free public education to their children. Most states have specific provisions in their constitutions prohibiting any public funding of sectarian schools.
State legislatures regulate the operation of public schools, but the actual day-to-day oversight rests with local school boards. Across the nation, 95 percent of local school boards are elected by popular vote. In some urban districts, school boards are appointed by the mayor or by a combination of different elected officials.
All of this is background to the current debates about who should control the schools. As a result of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top, the federal role changed dramatically in only a decade. Its powers expanded far beyond the imaginings of the legislators who passed ESEA in 1965 or who created the Department of Education in 1979.
No Child Left Behind put the federal government, with its relatively minor financial contribution, in the driver’s seat. The law requires all public schools to test all students in grades 3 through 8 in reading and mathematics, and it mandates specific sanctions for schools that do not make what the law defines as “adequate yearly progress.” No Child Left Behind passed with strong bipartisan support. For many years afterward, no one in Congress looked back to wonder why it had ditched federalism. After NCLB, the federal government assumed a command-and-control role that was never envisioned in 1965 or in 1979. For the first time in history, school districts and states had to ask permission from the U.S. Department of Education to change their plans to meet federal goals.
Race to the Top elevated the U.S. Department of Education into the equivalent of a national ministry of education. Building on the precedent established by NCLB, the Department of Education aggressively took charge of the nation’s education agenda and forcefully demanded that states and districts enact certain policies if they wanted to win a share of $5 billion in economic stimulus funds. If states wanted the money, they had to accept the conditions spelled out by Secretary Duncan. In 2009, the states were in deep fiscal distress and of course they wanted the money. So they accepted the conditions and they applied. The Obama administration pretended that states participated of their own volition, thus maintaining the fiction that Race to the Top was “voluntary” and that the federal government was not calling the tune. Many states rewrote their laws—agreeing to expand the number of charter schools, to evaluate teachers by test scores, and to adopt Common Core standards—in hopes of winning federal money.
Long before 2014, it was obvious that no state would meet the NCLB target; no state could claim that all of its students were proficient. Since Congress repeatedly failed to reauthorize NCLB (but extended it annually), Duncan offered waivers to states that agreed to accept his conditions. He canceled the 2014 deadline and substituted his own conditions. To obtain waivers, states had to agree to comply with the same conditions included in Race to the Top. They had to agree to adopt “college and career-readiness standards,” which most states understood as the Common Core State Standards that were funded mainly by the Gates Foundation and promoted by the Obama administration. They had to agree to test students to measure progress toward meeting the goals of college and career readiness; these were the tests funded by the Obama administration to assess the Common Core standards. They had to agree to submit their standards and assessments to the U.S. Department of Education for review. They had to agree to evaluate teachers and principals using student test scores as a significant part of their evaluation. They had to agree to establish a system of recognizing schools as “reward,” “focus,” and “priority,” with a plan to intervene aggressively in the “priority” schools, which were the lowest performing. They had to develop a plan to establish measurable objectives for all their schools.4
The combination of NCLB and Race to the Top changed the role of the federal government in American education. The Bush administration and the Obama administration, with the active (and in the case of Race to the Top, passive) consent of Congress, put the federal government in a dominant position. Federalism—understood as a balancing of powers among three levels of government—was eviscerated. The U.S. Department of Education took charge of driving school reform, imposing the policies it preferred. It gave directions to the state departments of education. The U.S. secretary of education became the nation’s superintendent of schools, telling every district and every school what was required of them to receive federal funding. For the first time in history, the federal government took control of the nation’s public schools.
As 2014 neared, many states applied for waivers to avoid the sanctions in NCLB. The states that won waivers had to accept the same conditions as states that won millions in Race to the Top funding, but the waivers brought no new funding, only new mandates. Among other conditions attached to the NCLB waivers, states agreed to rank schools by their test scores and to evaluate teachers to a significant degree by student test scores. As states began identifying “reward” schools at the top and “priority” schools at the bottom, they discovered an unremarkable fact. Schools in well-off districts were doing very well. The “priority” schools were overwhelmingly located in poor neighborhoods, serving high proportions of African American and Hispanic students. Perhaps as many as five thousand schools would be eligible for aggressive interventions, staff firings, even closures. Most were in impoverished neighborhoods, serving children of color. Where would thousands of new principals be found? Where would tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of “great” teachers be found?
For the first time in American history, states would rate teachers and principals by their students’ test scores to comply with federal directives. How many will be fired? Will they be correctly identified? Will they be the worst teachers, or will they be victims of a flawed method or teachers who had the bad luck to teach students with high needs? Will there be a game of musical chairs in which educators fired by one district are hired by another district? Or is there somewhere a huge cadre of new educators, waiting their turn to enter the profession and willing to take their chances at being next in line to be fired?
This, for now, is the federal role: The federal government controls the agenda. It issues requirements for those who want federal money; that money may be only 10 percent of the district budget, but no district or state can afford to walk away from millions of dollars in federal aid. To underline the federal government’s insistence on test scores as the measure of all things, the U.S. Department of Education informed colleges of education, both public and independent, that they would be held accountable for the test scores of the students taught by their graduates. This was a stretch indeed, and there was no research evidence to support this demand.
What happened to the state role? The states are now in a reactive mode, scrambling to comply with the new federal mandates and regulations. The state education departments have become the go-betweens, making sure that districts comply with the blizzard of federal requirements. There is no room for creativity or innovation. The state education departments now exist to enforce compliance and to add their own rules and mandates.
Under the present setup, local school boards are nearly irrelevant. The most important decisions are increasingly made by politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. To an extent unknown before in United States history, the federal Department of Education and its grantees are deciding what to teach, how to teach, who should teach, how to evaluate teachers, when to fire teachers, what kind of organization may qualify for public funding, and which education institutions will be allowed or not allowed to train teachers. Power over education has shifted decisively to the federal government. If these projections seem extreme, consider how improbable it would have been in 1980 or 1990 to imagine that the federal government would now be setting the rules for testing students and evaluating teachers.
We are headed in the wrong direction. American education should not be standardized and controlled by federal bureaucrats and congressional mandates. We achieved national greatness without a ministry of education regulating every school, every district, and every state. This is a big and diverse nation. The needs of schools in rural Nebraska are not the same as the needs of schools in District 10 in the South Bronx in New York City. For that matter, there is great variation in the needs of schools within the same state and often within the same district. One size does not fit all.
The very notion of a “Race to the Top” betrays the equity mission of the historic federal role in education. A “race” implies winners and losers. Equity implies a commitment to the education of every child. The reason that the federal government became involved in funding education was to promote equity, not to select winners and losers. Competition inevitably favors the strong and disadvantages the weak. The role of the federal government is not to honor the strong but to level the playing field for those students who have the least and need the most.
The U.S. Department of Education should reclaim its mantle as an agency whose fundamental mission is to promote equality of educational opportunity. At a time when nearly one-quarter of the children in this nation live in poverty, the U.S. Department of Education should promote equity for needy children, sponsor first-rate research, and advance educational policies that are supported by research and evidence. It should award grants based on need, not on competitions among districts and states. It should defend the civil rights of all children. It should advocate for early childhood education, class size reduction, social services, and other research-based policies for all students. It should provide research and information about the best programs across the country and around the world. It should inform the public and the profession about appropriate and inappropriate uses of assessment. It should continue its periodic national assessments of subjects taught in school, based on samples of the student population. It should provide research-based information to assist teachers and parents of children with special needs. The secretary of education should use his bully pulpit to keep before the public a vision of good education.
It should never again attempt to control every school in the United States. No one in Congress or the U.S. Department of Education has the knowledge, experience, or wisdom to impose his or her ideas and plans on every school and community in the nation. Just as we do not expect the U.S. military to police the streets of every city, town, and hamlet, we should not expect the Department of Education to direct the education of every child in every public school.
What, then, of the state education departments? They should resume their roles as agencies that serve the schools and districts of their states. They should provide technical assistance, resources, professional development, and other forms of support that districts may need. They should work together with teachers and scholars to develop curriculum frameworks so that there is continuity in teaching history, science, and other subjects in districts across the state. It should not be left to every district whether or when to teach science, the arts, civics, and history; state curricula should reflect modern scholarship, not religious or local opinion.
Every state should have teams of inspectors who visit schools and provide expert advice, who are empowered to send the schools whatever support services and resources the students need. Those who work in state education departments should see themselves as co-equals to those who work in schools and district offices, as partners and colleagues who collaborate to reach a shared goal: the education of the children of the district and the state. The state education commissioner should see himself or herself as an employee of the state board, not as the person who gives orders to schools that everyone must obey. In many states, there is more experience in the schools and in the district offices than in the state offices. The state commissioners should respect the wisdom of those who are closest to the schools of their community and should intervene only when a local board or district leadership is corrupt, irresponsible, or incompetent.
Then we come to local school boards. The corporate reformers don’t like school boards. They think they should be abolished or rendered toothless. In urban districts, the reformers want the mayor to have absolute control, unchecked by a school board with the power to question or overrule his decisions. In recent times, mayoral control began in Boston in 1992, in Chicago in 1995, in Cleveland in 1998, in New York City in 2002, and in the District of Columbia in 2007. Detroit tried mayoral control in 1999, but voters abandoned it in 2004 (which was probably just as well, since one of the mayors after 2004 went to jail).
The results of mayoral control have been mixed at best. From the reformers’ perspective, mayoral control is a success because it enables the mayor to close schools irrespective of community opinion and to open privately managed charter schools. The reformers consider it essential to sever any connection between the schools and any democratic control that might impede privatization. But the downside of mayoral control is that it eliminates the role of the public in public education. It eliminates the democratic nature of public education. It produces disengagement and anger among parents and community members, whose opinions are excluded from any decisions affecting their children and their communities. When people appear at hearings about school closings and their voices are disregarded, it erodes trust and civic engagement. Community anger about school reform was a leading cause of the defeat of Washington, D.C., mayor Adrian Fenty when he sought reelection in 2010. Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s school reform policies featured school closings, opening of more than a hundred charter schools, and a relentless emphasis on standardized tests to evaluate schools and teachers; by the end of the mayor’s third term, only 22 percent of New York City voters wanted his style of autocratic control to continue. Chicago’s system of mayoral control and its unending parade of reforms stoked the anger of the Chicago Teachers Union, which went on strike in 2012 for the first time in twenty-five years. When voters in most precincts in Chicago were asked whether they favored mayoral control of the schools, a resounding 87 percent said no.5
There is a reason that 95 percent of school districts in the United States have an elected board. Schools are a central part of the fabric of life in communities, villages, towns, and small cities. In big cities, the school boards are supposed to represent the interests of the communities that are served, whether by election or by appointment. Parents and members of local communities should have a voice in the democratic process of decision making. They should be heard. The purpose of the board in major urban districts should be to allow public participation, not to shut it out. Most people don’t like the idea of autocracy. Most Americans think that when it is their children and their tax dollars, they should be able to choose the people making the decisions or at the very least to be heard respectfully.
The reformers are correct when they say that school boards are an obstacle to radical change. They move slowly. They argue. They listen to different points of view. They make mistakes. They are not bold and transformative. They prefer incremental change. In short, they are a democratic forum. They are a check and balance against concentrated power in one person or one agency. The same complaints may be justly lodged against state legislatures and against Congress. They debate, they move slowly, one house checks the impulses of the other, they listen to their constituents. That’s democracy.
Authoritarian governments can move decisively. They listen to no one outside their inner circle. They are able to make change without pondering or taking opposing views into account. But they too make mistakes. And because they do not listen to the opposition, they may make even larger mistakes than democratic bodies. There is an arrogance to unchecked power. There is no mechanism to vet its ideas, so it plunges forward, sometimes into disastrous schemes.
Local control of the public schools is a venerable American tradition. American public schools should have elected local school boards. Their power is not absolute: they work within the context of federal and state law regarding civil rights and curriculum standards. The local board should be a forum for public opinion. The reason for this is clear. The school board picks the superintendent, and the superintendent works for the school board. When she makes a major policy decision, she must stand up in public and explain that decision. When she decides on a budget, she must stand up in public and explain it. Members of the public get to comment. If the decision or the budget meets overwhelming public rejection, the superintendent must rethink the decision. She cannot do whatever she wants or whatever the mayor wants without a thorough public airing. If the school board flouts public opinion, its members may go down to defeat.
In major cities that have an appointed board, different officials—not just the mayor—should select the board. The appointed board should serve for set terms, not at the pleasure of the appointing authority, so that members have a measure of independence. In big cities with an appointed board, there should be local school councils where parents can become involved, work with school staff to review the budget, and have a say in the education of their children.
If we believe in democracy, and if we believe that public schools must act in concert with the principles of democracy, then we must reject authoritarianism from any quarter, be it the mayor, the state education department, or the federal government. No one should exercise untrammeled control over education policy and have the power to ignore public opinion. The children belong to the parents, and the schools belong to the public, not to the mayor or the governor or the president. Public officials are elected to serve the public, not to control it.
No reform idea is so compelling and so urgent that it requires the suspension of democracy. Supporters of top-down reforms say that the situation is so dire that “we cannot wait.” Their ideas are not good enough to require the sacrifice of democracy. Only in wartime do we willingly suspend our right to have a say about how we are governed, and even then we lose our liberties at our peril. The rise or fall of test scores and graduation rates is not a sufficient reason to eliminate democratic participation by the people. Elected officials should respect the judgment of professional educators about how to run schools and work cooperatively with them to make sure that the needs of students are met and that the budget is sufficient and responsibly managed, but educators too ultimately work for the public.
Schools need the support of the entire community, including parents, educators, community leaders, civic leaders, business leaders, and the mayor. Two decades of experimentation with the governance of public schools has demonstrated certain fundamental truths: Some decisions should be made at the national level; some at the state level; and some at the local level. Every school should be able to respond to the needs of the children it enrolls and have the resources to do it well.
Because public schools need the support of the public that funds them, they should have the widest possible community support. Community support means democratic governance. School districts should be governed by those who are willing to work diligently to improve them and by those who have the greatest stake in the success of the children and the community.