Bored of Education?

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

—Mark Twain, “Following the Equator,” Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, 1897

When Twain penned this oft-cited quotation, the concept of local school boards overseeing public education was still relatively new. The model for this most grass-roots of governmental bodies was born in Massachusetts in 1837, and most states would follow its blueprint as the country’s population grew.

The fact that today there are approximately 95,000 board members serving on 15,000 public school boards might make Twain twirl in his grave. If he could audit just one board meeting of a large urban district—say, the San Diego Unified School District at one of its more spirited sessions last year—imagine the venomous satire he would spew forth.

With only a handful of exceptions, local school boards in the United States typically share the following characteristics, according to a 2002 report prepared by Johns Hopkins and Howard universities and underwritten by the U.S. Department of Education:
# Large districts are governed by small boards of generally five to seven trustees. In California, state law mandates that the board members be elected. They are charged with setting local education policy and ensuring that state and federal requirements are met.
# Policies they oversee include fiscal, personnel, instructional and student-related issues.
# They rely on a professional superintendent for management. They hire and fire the superintendent. They adopt budgets and negotiate with employee unions.

It may be stating the obvious, but the ideal school board member is one who is willing to promote education for every child. It may be equally obvious to say that today’s local governing bodies and the complex issues they face have led school board members to interfere with every child’s education.

“Our job is to hire competent management and stay out of administrative stuff,” says Tom Page, president of the board of trustees of the Grossmont Union High School District. As a board member, he says, a problem develops when “you learn that policy is tough, and policy tends not to be particularly rewarding in a political sense. Meddling in administrative stuff is somehow more satisfying, easier to report on, maybe easier to do.”

Page touches on an issue that has become a growing concern for educators and the public alike: Nationally and locally, many school board aspirants fall into one of two groups—candidates who view the board as their ticket into the world of “big politics” and special-interest representatives with an ax to grind and who want to do it in the media spotlight.

“A school board is the cheapest political platform you can buy,” says Ron Ottinger, a 10-year member of the San Diego city schools’ board and its current president—although he notes that San Diego Unified’s recent board election is an exception to the “cheap” rule. “It is the acquisition of a venue for whatever your deal is. If it’s about education, it can be in a constructive way, or it can be intentionally in a destructive way.”

High-profile events in some local school systems illustrate Ottinger’s provocative point. Ten years ago, the Vista school district grappled with the issue of creationism and whether it should be added to the curriculum alongside evolution. The controversy divided the board, dominated then by a self-proclaimed Christian majority, and drew negative publicity from all nonfundamentalist quarters.

“Everyone with a right-wing agenda across the nation came to our school board meetings,” recalls teacher Randy Wiens, a past president of the Vista Teachers Association. “Meetings became a bully pulpit for this agenda and that agenda.”

In the Grossmont district, Page faces what he sees as a comparable controversy—issues that may not be religion, per se, but are religion-based. He is viewed as a moderate voice on a board where the three-trustee majority is what he calls “a far-right conservative Christian group.” This majority, says Page, stands for strong local control over curriculum and spending, but more importantly, he adds, an end “to using the classrooms to promote controversial nonacademic agendas.

“They believe there are certain things that should be taught in the schools and certain things that are the prerogative of the family—like heath and sex issues, which, they believe, have no place in the school system,” he says.

The criticism of school board politics and special interests dates back well before the days of Mark Twain. But today’s school boards face increasingly complicated issues. According to the previously cited 2002 report, these include growing interference on the state and federal levels (particularly in relation to mandated programs and local funding flexibility); greater public apathy and lack of confidence in public schools; the increasing power of teachers’ unions; more diverse student populations; and more pervasive social problems, such as drug use and homelessness.

Yet, the report notes, school boards continue to be valued and supported by the general public, as evidenced by the following comments cited in its pages:
# They “provide the crucial link between public values and professional expertise.”
# They are “the epitome of representative governance in our democracy.”
# “School board membership is the highest form of public service.”

“The challenge for school boards and those proposing school board and educational governance reforms,” the report concludes, “is to figure out which forms of governance and management, operational procedures and priorities best match local characteristics and translate into improved educational outcomes, particularly greater academic achievement.”

School districts in San Diego County, along with districts across the nation, are experimenting with a variety of decision-making procedures to help abate criticism that large urban districts do not adequately address the needs of individual communities. Charter schools and site-based decision-making councils are two of the more common programs. In general, these programs grant greater autonomy to schools for issues such as budgeting, curriculum and personnel decisions in exchange for academic accountability.

Two of the most radical reforms—state and mayoral takeovers of school districts and outright elimination of school boards —have not occurred in San Diego County, but they have been used in a sprinkling of large urban districts, including Jersey City, Chicago, Boston and Detroit, after academic achievement figures had dropped off the chart.

San Diego’s Ottinger offers yet another provocative assessment of school boards. He says he has studied major districts across the nation, as well as state-run school systems in Japan, England, France and Germany, and has concluded: “There are very few districts where you can say that school boards have been a constructive element.”

He singles out one question now begging public discussion: Are school boards part of the solution or part of the problem?

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