Big City School Boards: Problems and Options
December 2002
Paul Hill, Kelly Warner-King, Christine Campbell, Meaghan McElroy, Isabel Munoz-Colon
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Newspapers across the country are filled with stories about failing schools and large numbers of students who cannot pass statewide exams or who abandon school before graduating. Everyone thinks urban school boards should do something about these problems. However, urban school boards spend very little of their time considering ways to turn around failed schools or thinking about transforming the educational experiences of the children least likely to succeed. On the contrary, board meetings are typically spent listening to everything from next year’s budget and citizen’s complaints to wading through changes in bus schedules and awarding presentations. A vision of education is not the first thing to come to mind when boards and their members are brought up for discussion.
Today, school boards are expected to be:
- Interest representatives, protecting and distributing benefits to neighborhoods, ethnic groups, or political coalitions that make up part, but not all, of the community served by the school district.
- Trustees for children, ensuring young people are fully prepared for the future demands of citizenship and economic life, even when those needs conflict with the shorter term concerns of taxpayers, school employees, and parents.
- Delegates of the state, administering programs created by the state government and fulfilling mandates established by state and federal governments and by courts.
These missions are in conflict because they require boards to serve different masters and accomplish different objectives. Boards that serve children’s long term educational needs above all else can fail on other missions, e.g. representing constituents who want to minimize education’s cost to taxpayers, or protecting unproductive school employees. Boards that try to be faithful implementers of directives from the state can dash the hopes of their local constituents or impose burdens that make schools less effective. For example, some state policies (e.g. mandatory reductions in class size) have proven to improve student learning in some districts and lead to declines in school quality in others.
Mission confusion – between the board’s roles as trustee for children, representing interest groups, and overseeing management and administration – is one reason why school boards often look disorganized and even knavish. For the most part, however, the confusion is not of the boards’ making. Critics say that school boards meddle in issues that should be left to professionals, treat schooling as a formal government program rather than as community-based caring function, and provide perches from which ambitious individuals can run for higher office.
Legal advisers can easily make the case that boards may be held responsible (and school districts held liable) for many of the details involved in, for example, transportation policy or curriculum. (If a state mandates safety seats for small or young children, what are school bus drivers required to do for kindergarten and first-grade students on field trips? If a diploma depends on passing a competency examination, can the district be held liable for a poor curriculum?) In this light, board members who micromanage, play politics, or intervene on behalf of individual parents or school employees do not misunderstand the traditional school board mission. They understand it all too well.
