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God created idiots," wrote Mark Twain. "That was for practice. Then
he created school boards." Is it time to
undo God's work, and abolish district school boards? Around the
nation, education-reform activists, such as Arizona State Superintendent
of Public Instruction Lisa Graham, are suggesting that states should
just hand over education funding directly to the local schools,
instead of passing the money through a school-district bureaucracy.
According to scholars John Chubb and Terry Moe of the liberal Brookings
Institution, school boards are a major obstacle to education reform.
Because of the heavy spending and strong volunteer effort of the
teachers' unions, school boards tend to be controlled by members
who owe their jobs to the union.
For instance, in a typical school-board election in Jefferson County,
Colo. (the state's most heavily populated county), the Colorado
Education Association (CEA) spends over $50,000 on its candidates,
while candidates opposed by the CEA are forced to run a county-wide
race on a budget of only $5,000.
There's nothing wrong with the CEA spending its money on politics,
and it would a free-speech infringement to attempt to drive the
CEA out of politics through campaign-spending limitations. But the
CEA's ability to control school boards becomes problematic when
union needs clash with student needs — such as when rigid rules
make it nearly impossible to fire incompetent teachers.
Indeed, the rigidity imposed by school boards is often harmful to
high-quality teachers. For example, in the Boulder Valley School
District (next to Jefferson County, Colo.), School Board President
Stan Garnett announced that race could
| “When
all schools in a large school district have to follow
the same policy, set by a single board, parents and students
don't get the kind of education they want.” |
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never
become the subject of scientific inquiry by students. He shut down
a science-fair project by a third-grade girl who had studied whether
adults and children thought a black Barbie prettier than a white
Barbie — or whether people simply preferred the Barbie with
the better dress.
Next there's the problem of bureaucratic centralization. There is
no way that a board of from five to seven individuals — no
matter how brilliant and altruistic — could possibly create
the best educational experience for each and every child in their
district.
Consider the Jefferson and Denver County School Districts. Together
these two districts "serve" almost a quarter of the entire school
population in the state. That means that a total of 12 people set
the conditions to hire all the teachers, build all the buildings,
set the curriculum, and spend all the tax dollars for the education
of some 140,000 children.
When all schools in a large school district have to follow the same
policy, set by a single board, parents and students don't get the
kind of education they want. For example, the school-board elections
in Littleton, Colo. have involved huge fights between advocates
of academic fundamentals and advocates of "outcome-based" education.
In Boulder, control swings back and forth between a CEA faction
that despises charter schools and opposes enriched classes for advanced
students in middle school and a group of insurgents who desire a
diversity of schools, and want kids to be able to progress as fast
as they can. (The reigning faction is the anti-diversity, anti-advancement
group.) Accordingly, no matter who wins the election, a large number
of parents and students will lose, since the whole district gets
run by a philosophy that runs counter to students' academic interests.
Some boards do recognize that they must at least pay lip service
to the demands for decentralization, but very rarely does a board
devolve real power to the parents and faculty of a local school.
Even in Denver's highly touted "collaborative decision-making" model
(which involves parents in school decisions), no school team can
contract out for education services or hire and fire teachers or
control most of the spending in the school.
Despite Mark Twain's quip, school boards used to get a lot more
respect about a century ago. Then, school districts were much smaller,
and school boards really were instruments of democratic, community
involvement in the schools.
But today, the school boards of the huge, consolidated school districts
wrest power away from local communities. In the massive Jefferson
County school district, voters in Lakewood have no burning interest
in electing the people charged with governing the public schools
in faraway Golden? (And vice versa.)
The school-board lobby (e.g., the Colorado Association of School
Boards (CASB)) and its legislative allies raise three main objections
to handing over the state's educational funds directly to local
schools.
First, the state might lose federal-education funding, they fear,
since certain federal grants must be given to school boards, not
to individual schools. True, but this is just an argument to shift
federal education funding toward a less-restrictive block-grant
program. In any case, the cost of complying with federal mandates
and paperwork eats up many of the benefits of federal support.
Second, large, centrally governed school districts supposedly create
economies of scale. CASB's executive director compared school districts
to Wal-Mart, with its large purchasing power. But being big isn't
the same as being efficient. Wal-Mart has competitors, while school
boards have a quasi-monopoly. If centralized control always produced
economies of scale, the Soviet Union would have been the richest
country on earth.
Besides, independently owned companies can and do compete with Wal-Mart
by forming voluntary-purchasing cooperatives. Without school boards,
individual schools could work together to buy desks and chalk in
bulk. Without school boards, principals of individual schools would
be free to fire incompetent teachers, reward the best teachers with
a year-end bonus, and spend money to repair the gymnasium —
without having to send reams of paper to the school-district office
begging for permission.
Without school boards, local schools would have more money, since
state aid wouldn't be siphoned off by an intermediary bureaucracy.
Finally, some states, including Colorado,
constitutionally mandate that state aid to education will be funneled
through school boards, and that school districts will be the main
revenue generators of local-property taxes. So, full abolition of
school districts in some states would probably require a state constitutional
amendment.
Yet even without a constitutional amendment, most state legislatures
have the authority to re-draw school-district boundaries. Legislatures
could therefore split the monster school districts into much smaller
pieces that would comprise genuine communities; so, at the very
least, medium-sized cities could have their own school district.
Indeed, large cities could have several school districts. As University
of Colorado economist (and Independence Institute Senior Fellow)
Barry
Poulson has detailed, the consolidation of small school districts
into mega-districts has played an important role in the decline
of educational quality.
Just ask yourself. If you were charged with the responsibility of
creating an education system and if you had no model on which you
could rely, would you design the present system? Would you give
all the resources to a few people? Would you consider the possibility
that allowing schools to control the economic resources available
to them would encourage more effective allocations of those resources
— and better learning?
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