Have school boards become part of the problem with our schools instead of part of the cure? Plenty of critics would say yes, and some are ready to get rid of the democratic control of our schools altogether. That, after all, is what voucher proposals would do.
But many people hesitate to discard a time-honored institution that gives voters a say in running their local schools. In "Why Not Charter School Boards?" (American School Board Journal, November 1993), Phillip Schlechty and Robert Cole say we don't have to choose. They have a bold idea for shaping up school boards without throwing away democratic control.
What's wrong with school boards? Even if you forget about the boards that are informal employment agencies for families and friends of board members, critics say that school boards rarely have an educational vision to guide their decisions. Most boards may do a good job picking out a new floor for the gymnasium, but, critics say, they have no framework to help them decide important educational questions--like which curriculum or which proposal for school-based management would be better. For some boards, constant squabbling stands in the way of even simple decisions.
This disharmony comes partly from the nature of school board elections. Voter turnout is very low in most places: somewhere between five and fifteen percent. As a result, it's relatively easy for special-interest candidates to get elected; and having a couple of extreme right- or left-wing board members can make it tough to achieve consensus.
Boards also become politicized and contentious when members are elected to represent the interests of a particular neighborhood or a particular ethnic or racial group--which is often the case. And the fact that board members run as individuals discourages their working together. If somebody wants to get reelected, he's much more likely to build name recognition by dumping on the superintendent or opposing some measure that the rest of the board supports than by being a team player.
In an atmosphere like this, what's good for the students or the schools can end up taking second place. And few of the initiatives that are supposed to turn the schools around last long enough to succeed or fail before being replaced by new initiatives--and the same goes for superintendents. In other words, there is a lot of activity but little headway in solving educational problems.
But what if school boards were elected as a slate instead of as individuals? And what if they had to run on a charter--a detailed description of long-term goals and strategies for the school district and how it planned to implement them? That's what Schlechty and Cole propose, and it could make an enormous difference in the way school boards operate.
Under their plan, voters would know, for example, how a slate proposed to distribute resources among schools and what kind of control its school-based management plan would give to individual schools, as well as what schools it proposed closing. Since several slates would undoubtedly run, voters would be able to see various possibilities for their schools laid out and debated.
Voters would also know that each slate had already agreed on its priorities and policies and had ironed out potential conflicts. So there would be no need for members of a successful slate to waste time fighting and jockeying for position and trying to get themselves on the nightly news. The board's incentives would all be in the direction of being successful as a team, and they could jump right in and get to work putting their plan into operation.
But even a school board that pulled together would need time to bring its plans to fruition. Schlechty and Cole propose that slates be elected for at least a four-year term and preferably longer--perhaps as much as ten years. What would happen if a board was obviously failing to carry out its promises? Schlechty and Cole propose oversight by a governmental body and a recall mechanism so voters could get rid of a board in case of misconduct or misrepresentation.
Charter schools are a very popular idea right now, but does anybody really think we will be able to reform our education system one school at a time? States should be focusing on districts and encouraging them to look at ways of improving their performance, and school board reform is an obvious place to start. Schlechty and Cole's proposal to charter school boards instead of schools preserves democratic control at the same time as it tilts the balance away from politics and toward education. It's an outstanding and workable idea.