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School Boards
Vital Issues for School Board Members
- Say what?
School board members need to learn the buzzwords of the education industry, to be able
to discern the meaningful from pretty-sounding but possibly dangerous babble.
To start, go to our page,
Eduspeak - Learning the Lingo.
This important article should be read by all
school board members:
"Nurturing The Life Of The Mind: If Schools Don't Value Intellect, Who Will?"
American School Board Journal (cover story), National School Boards Association,
January 2001.
This is a wake-up call for school board members, alerting them
to the anti-knowledge mentality that pervades education. Excerpts:
"Our schools, with their high academic standards, high-stakes
tests, and performance bonuses for improved achievement scores --
surely our schools are bastions of intellectualism?
Not necessarily.
Your parents and community, even your teachers and administrators,
perhaps even you, might unwittingly be holding back your schools from
cultivating intellect in your students and exposing them to the joys
of the life of the mind. ...
"Symptoms of pervasive anti-intellectualism in our schools aren't difficult to find. ...
The idea that children must be entertained and feel
good while they learn has been embraced by many
well-meaning educators. In many classrooms, as a result, students are
watching movies, working on multimedia presentations,
surfing the Internet, putting on plays, and dissecting
popular song lyrics. The idea is to
motivate students, but the emphasis on
enjoyment as a facile substitute for
engagement creates a culture in which students
are not likely to challenge themselves or stretch their abilities. ...
"Project-based learning always has the potential
to be based on fun rather than content, says former
teacher and administrator Elaine McEwan. ... She
uses the example of a class of academically
struggling elementary school students in
Arizona that spent 37 hours -- more than
a school week -- building a papier-mache
dinosaur. The local newspaper even ran a photo of
the students and their handiwork. 'Those kids couldn't
read well, and they spent all that time messing with chicken wire and wheat
paste,' says McEwan."
"You Can Always Look It Up ... Or Can You?" by
E.D. Hirsch, Jr., "American Educator" magazine (American Federation
Of Teachers), Spring 2000. This is a powerful and dramatic article by
Hirsch defending the role of knowledge in education. The question is
whether a "skills" curriculum that emphasizes "projects", "research",
"webquests", "reports" and the like is an adequate alternative to
learning a rich core of knowledge.
This article is highly
recommended!
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Lost In Action: Are Time-Consuming, Trivializing
Activities Displacing The Cultivation Of Active Minds? by
Gilbert T Sewall, "American Educator" magazine (American Federation
Of Teachers), Summer 2000. Another powerful article from the AFT's
magazine, this time calling into question the trend of
extended projects in place of real learning.
This article is
highly recommended!
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The Other Crisis in American Education
by Daniel J. Singal,
Professor of History at Hobart & William Colleges,
Atlantic Monthly, November 1991. (The link is to another source that has posted this
important and influential article.)
"Two crises are stalking american education. Each poses a major
threat to the nation's future. ... The first crisis, which centers on
disadvantaged minority children attending inner-city schools, has
received considerable attention, as well it should. ...
"The second crisis, in contrast, ... involves approximately half the
country's student population--the group that educators refer to as
'college-bound.' Although the overwhelming majority of these students
attend suburban schools, a fair number can be found in big-city or
consolidated rural districts, or in independent or parochial schools.
Beginning in the mid-1970s these students have been entering college
so badly prepared that they have performed far below potential, often
to the point of functional disability. ...
"Our brightest youngsters, those most likely to be headed for
selective colleges, have suffered the most dramatic setbacks over the
past two decades -- a fact with grave implications for our ability to
compete with other nations in the future. If this is true -- and
abundant evidence exists to suggest that it is -- then we indeed have a
second major crisis in our education system."
Curriculum and School Boards
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It's the local school board, not the hired administration,
that has the authority to approve curriculum
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What role does the school board have in approving curriculum?
A step further: What responsibility does the school board hold when a lousy curriculum
innovation infests the school?
There often is confusion about the role of the school board
in setting the direction for education in the district.
Obviously, the board hires the superintendent, so it exerts
great influence on this direction at that time. The exact duties
and responsibilities of the school board vary from state to
state.
In Illinois at least, the role of the board in
setting educational goals goes further. Here are some items
from the
Illinois School Code that relate to this:
- "The school board shall direct, through policy, the superintendent in
his or her charge of the administration of the school district,
including without limitation considering the recommendations of the
superintendent concerning the budget, building plans, the locations
of sites, the selection, retention, and dismissal of employees, and
the selection of textbooks, instructional material, and courses of
study." (105 ILCS 5/10-16.7)
- Moreover, the role of the superintendent regarding curriculum is legally
restricted to making a recommendation to the board: The district
superintendent is required to "make recommendations to the board
concerning ... the selection of textbooks, instructional material and
courses of study."
(105 ILCS 5/10-21.4 )
- Textbooks can only be adopted in the full light of day, and with board majority approval:
"... textbooks and courses of instruction shall be adopted or
changed only at the regular meetings of the board and by a vote of a
majority of the full membership of the board ..."
(105 ILCS 5/34-19)
The Illinois Association of School Boards
maintains this policy statement in support of local school boards
in curriculum matters:
"The Illinois Association of School Boards shall support the
right and responsibility of each local school board to determine
its curricular content."
(Adopted 1981; Amended 1983, 1988, 2001)
The school district in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania has formal statements of policy on
their board's authority on curriculum. These make fairly good models for consideration
by other boards, including here in Illinois. Here are some key excerpts:
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105. Curriculum Development (PDF):
- "The Board is responsible for the curriculum of the district's schools."
- "A listing of all curriculum materials shall be made available for the information of
parents/guardians, students, staff and Board members."
- "With prior Board approval, the Superintendent may conduct pilot programs as
deemed necessary to the continuing improvement of the instructional program." [Emphasis added]
- "The Superintendent shall report periodically to the Board each pilot program, along
with its objectives, evaluative criteria, and costs."
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105.1. Curriculum Review By Parents/Guardians and Students (PDF):
- "The Board adopts this policy to ensure that parents/guardians have an opportunity to
review instructional materials and have access to information about the curriculum,
including academic standards to be achieved, instructional materials and assessment
techniques."
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108. Adoption of Textbooks (PDF):
- "It is the responsibility of the Board to adopt all textbooks used for instruction in the
educational program of this district."
- In this district, the Board has the final say, just as in Illinois,
but it takes a two-third vote for the Board to override the recommendation of the
superintendent:
"The Superintendent shall be responsible for the selection and recommendation of
textbooks for Board consideration. No adoption or change of textbooks shall be
made without the Superintendent's recommendation, except by a two-thirds vote of
the Board."
- "In considering the approval of any proposed textbook, the Board will evaluate its:
... (2) Freedom from bias."
- "A list of all approved textbooks shall be prepared and maintained. It shall be
reviewed periodically by the Superintendent or designee and made available for the
information of the professional staff, Board members, students, and parents/
guardians."
Bias and Curriculum
We find it very ironic that the
Illinois School Code
encourages the adoption of something called "Anti-bias education"
(105 ILCS 5/27-23.6)
yet there is nothing in the code to require Boards or administrators to seek
classroom textbooks that avoid bias!
Goals and Functions of School Boards
- The Summer 2004 issue of Education Next magazine featured a compelling
pair of articles arguing the relevance of school boards:
- Introduction: The Future of School Boards: Agents of reform or defenders of the status quo?
Excerpt:
"Across the nation, urban officials are becoming increasingly disillusioned
with the performance of elected school boards."
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Steering a True Course by Sarah C. Glover. Excerpt:
"Have school boards outlived their usefulness? Are they an anachronism?
To answer these questions, we must consider why most school districts
consistently perform at mediocre levels -- and why some districts fail children in vast numbers. ...
Are school boards to blame for this state of affairs? No. But can school boards
help to change this state of affairs? Absolutely."
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Lost at Sea by Chester E. Finn Jr. and Lisa G. Keegan.
Excerpt:
"Cities across America are beginning to recognize that the traditional
school board is no longer the embodiment of participatory democracy it
was intended to be. The romantic notion that local school boards are
elected by local citizens has been replaced with the reality that
these elections are essentially rigged."
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Are School Boards Accountable?
by Bill Carlson, Education News. This school board member in California recalls,
"Newly elected school board members [were] encouraged to attend a
basic training session ... The training, when I attended, also
included instruction on proper mindset imperatives that new
board members were expected to assimilate and other
survival-skill information [including these:]
1. ... should [a] final vote not favor your position,
support the majority decision anyway.
"An essential quality of a good Board Member is a deep sense
of loyalty to associates and to group decisions cooperatively reached."
(Board Bylaw 9010)
2. Support your administration.
But ... over the past decade nearly all public school administrators
in California advised their school boards to adopt deeply flawed
reading and math programs for students in elementary grades.
Apparently without accountability, trusting school boards were
misled by ill-advised administrators."
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"I could be advocating the next nuttiness in your life."
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Believe in Government, Believe in Me
by Jim Fedako, June 30, 2006.
An Ohio school board member writes, "one of the easiest ways to end a
family reunion in anger is to begin telling siblings how to raise
their children," but despite that, "I get to make decisions that
affect the lives and future of other's children. All it takes is for
an article in an education periodical or posting on a web site to
catch my attention and I could be advocating the next nuttiness in
your life."
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Local schools? Don't make me laugh!
by Alan Caruba, August 20, 2001:
"As parents prepare to send their children back to school,
more and more of them at some point discover that their local
school board has no control whatever over what is taught in their schools."
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A Misesian on the School Board
by Jim Fedako, May 05, 2006.
"The irony is that as the public school system slips ever further
into disarray, more interventions are proposed and implemented. Each
new program simply adds more layers of regulations, which then
require new interventions, ad infinitum. ...
"The problems are large and getting larger, though the solution is as
simple today as it was over two hundred years ago. Why then can't the
officials find the solution? Simple, they refuse to admit that they
themselves are the problem. ...
"I started my intellectual journey toward economic truths after I was
first elected. At the time I believed in the system. Sure there were
failures in the past, but I was going to be the one to set the right
direction, I would be the omniscient one. But as Mises showed decades
earlier, and Rothbard confirmed, there is no rational way to direct a
government bureaucracy . In fact, it's impossible. It does not even
matter if the elected or appointed board member or administrator is
skilled in the market or knowledgeable about economics; all members
of a bureaucracy are flying blind. ...
"Bush proposes federal initiatives, state education departments add
new programs, and local school boards pronounce missions and goals,
but each can fix nothing. They simply form the current version of the
Soviet Gosplan, creating five-year plans of improvement that will
only create more havoc, more chaos. ... Two questions beg answers:
What are the solutions? And, what am I doing serving the beast."
Rules, Laws, Elections
- For more information on the laws and rules of the Illinois School code
that covers operation of school boards, see our page
on Illinois Laws and Rules.
- On that page, these items are highly relevant to operation of school boards:
- For information on school board elections and tax-hike referenda, see our page
on Elections and Referenda.
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FAQ on School Board Vacancies,
Illinois Council of School Attorneys, May 2009. A school board may have a vacancy for such reasons as death,
resignation, or a member moving out o fthe district. This short guide provides answers
to common questions about such vacancies.
"Board Packets"
Materials to be distributed to board members at their meetings are available for public
access. This is often an excellent source to discover facts about a district, since these
board materials often go into far greater detail than public releases.
Rules on access vary by district. Typically, citizens can request copies of the board
packet prior to a regular school board meeting. Some districts (e.g., Glenbrook High Schools,
Niles Township High School)
have simplified the process
by providing all of the materials in the board packet on their websites.
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Board Packets, comments by Lennie Jarratt on Education Matters:
"It is a shame that a taxpayer has to continually FOIA these
documents and provide them to public instead of the schools
themselves. They continue to ask the taxpayers to provide money for
education and yet they refuse to trust the taxpayer with information
that would show how well they are spending the money we provide and
how effective this money is utilized to increase student
performance."
Information a School District SHOULD Provide
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Here's our Illinois Loop recommendation on what
information a school district should provide:
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School Boards vs. Parents
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"The concerned parent addressing the local school
board has no power to influence any decision, nor do the taxpayers"
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Why Parents and Taxpayers Have No Say In Education
by Tom DeWeese, May 14, 2001, Excerpt:
"Parents across this nation are always astounded to discover they
have no say in the education of their children. They may, if
sufficiently stirred with concern, attend and even speak at a meeting
of their local board of education, but the reality of who actually
controls the education of their children is far more complex and
distant. ... [Author John Taylor] Gatto points out that control of
the education enterprise is distributed between more than twenty
interest groups, each of which can be subdivided into warring
factions. This removes the actual decision-making process affecting
every single child from either their parents or the taxpayers called
upon to underwrite the billions involved. 'The financial interests of
these associated voices are served whether children learn to read or
not,' says Gatto. ...
Little wonder, then, the concerned parent addressing the local school
board has no power to influence any decision, nor do the taxpayers
who must ultimately pay the costs of an educational system everyone
agrees is failing to prepare students to read, to write, to master
the basic elements of arithmetic and mathematics. The broad-based
knowledge of the liberal arts, history, literature, and science,
necessary to make informed decisions, is so lacking that entire
generations of Americans are at risk of knowing little of what they
require to maintain and protect the nation."
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Accountability Lost: Student learning seldom a factor in school board elections
by Christopher Berry and William G. Howell, Education Next, Winter 2008.
- Cartoons from "Weapons of Math Destruction":
Are School Boards Needed?
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School Boards: Democratic Ideal Or A Troubled Anachronism?
By Teresa Méndez, Christian Science Monitor
October 21, 2003.
"Resolved: 'School boards should be abolished.'
This was the subject of a ... debate recently held at
Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. ...
Both those who champion public school boards and those in favor of
abolishing them argue passionately that schools must maintain a high
standard of cost-effective education. And they must be accountable to
taxpayers, students, and families.
But are school boards the best body for achieving these goals?
Chester Finn resoundingly replied 'no.' From behind a podium in
Harvard's Taubman Building, the Fordham Foundation president called
school boards the worst kind of anachronism. With wit and fervor, he
likened them to 'middle management.'
They are ripe for corruption, a springboard for aspiring politicians,
and a venue for disgruntled former school employees to air dirty
laundry, he said."
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What's So Sacred About a School Board?
by Fred Hiatt, Washington Post, Page A21, May 6, 2002.
"Do we really need school boards?
It's not a politically correct question -- anti-democratic, and all that -- but
it's not an outlandish one, either. ...
We don't elect our city police chief, or our county health
commissioner or a board to govern road work. Yet no one sees that as
a terrible denial of democracy. We elect mayors and city councils, or
county supervisors, and expect them to balance the budget and deliver
the services. If they fail, they get voted out. Why shouldn't the
people who make the budget take similar responsibility for public
schools?"
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Who Needs School Boards?
by Chester Finn, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, October 23, 2003.
"None of the civic reformers who dreamed up public education's
governance system in the late 19th century pictured such a creature.
What we have today in the local school board, especially the elected
kind, is an anachronism and an outrage. A dinosaur indeed. We can no
longer pretend it's working well or hide behind the mantra of "local
control of education." We need to steel ourselves to put this
dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery and move on to something
that will work for children."
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Why School Boards?
by Chester Finn, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, March 21, 2001.
"There's a big debate in Cleveland about whether mayoral control [of school boards]
should continue. Other American communities are weighing the merits
of elected versus appointed boards. ...
But that begs the truly interesting question, which is why do we need school boards at all? ...
Too many school boards are scenes of bickering, log-rolling and vanity ...
When elected, they often wind up being pawns of the teachers union. When appointed ...
they mainly work to secure the interests of their patrons. ...
Better still, let's face contemporary reality and redefine 'local control' of education.
Matching it to municipal boundaries may have made sense in the 19th century but it doesn't today ..."
Observations
From our page on education quotes, here are some items regarding
school boards:
"The [school district system] seems impervious to reform from within.
In my experience, those who join district boards, even those who start
out reform-minded, eerily become co-opted and wind up defending
the system tooth and nail. It's just like watching Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
-- Lisa Graham Keegan, former Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona
"The traditional school district is one of the biggest obstacles to
improving the public schools. Today's district is a rigid command-and-control
system that offers dissatisfied parents no choices except, if they don't like
the district school, to send their kids to private school or to home-school them."
-- Lisa Graham Keegan, former Superintendent of Public Instruction, State of Arizona
"...it has continued to amaze me that the concept of customer service
doesn't seem to have ever sunk into enterprises like school boards in general."
-- Scott Hochberg, Texas State Representative
"In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards."
-- Mark Twain (1835-1910), "Following the Equator," ch. 61, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar (1897)
"School boards are an aberration, an anachronism, an educational sinkhole ...
Put this dysfunctional arrangement out of its misery."
-- Chester Finn, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education
"Contract restrictions are something about which school board members
often complain. But, wait. How do these provisions get into the contract?
Why, of course. The school boards agree to them. But they don't talk about that."
-- David W. Kirkpatrick
"Many conservatives cling nostalgically to the notion
of 'local control' of education. ... But local school boards ... provide perhaps the greatest example of the
inefficiency and dysfunctions of any government entities
in the United States ..."
-- Clint Bolick,
Leviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Civil Liberty, p. 144.
"If education isn't our mission and if we don't have anything worthwhile to say,
then school boards are the managed living dead and we can hardly ask the
public to see us as necessary."
-- a school board member, writing in the American School Boards Journal, October 2001
"The near-impossibility of true educational reform has been documented in a number of studies ...
Now that I'm off the board and able to think more calmly, it is even clearer
to me that the system can't be rehabilitated, only replaced."
-- Howard Good, "Losing It, The Confessions of an Ex-School Board President"
""'Nature,' as H. L. Mencken so insightfully put it, 'abhors a moron.' The same
obviously cannot be said of school boards who often hire them."
-- Charles Sykes, 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School
Definition of "micromanagement": asking about details that the superintendent
wants to keep quiet.
"In 1930 there were 200,000 school boards in the United States.
Today, with twice as many citizens and three times as many
students in our public schools, we have only 15,000.
Once one of every 500 citizens sat on a school board;
today it's one out of nearly 20,000.
Once most of us knew a school board member personally; today it's rare to know one."
-- Deborah Meier, writing in American School Board Journal, September 2003
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