Governing Partners: State-Local Relations in the United States by Russell L. Hanson

Author:Russell L. Hanson [Hanson, Russell L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780813326016
Google: h3NgDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 4362097
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1998-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

Education Governance Today

School District Governance

Due to its omission from the U.S. Constitution, education is formally a state function. Every state except Hawaii has created local agencies, called school districts, to administer that function. There are situations in which local control is an obstacle to equity, no matter how one defines it. The most egregious current examples are the grossly unequal resources expended on children living in different districts in almost every state. On the other hand, American courts and the majority of the American people hold that local control protects parental rights, community choice, and participatory democracy (Briffault 1992: 773).

There is no dispute that the states are superior to the school districts as guarantors of equity. Yet school districts can make a strong case that they are superior to the states as protectors of parental rights and community choice. To the extent that the school districts really do provide putative advantages of local control, the relationship between the states and the school districts is a truly intergovernmental relationship. To the extent that the school districts are essentially administrative rather than republican political institutions, the relationship is merely an intragovernmental one, in which political exchanges are strictly of the bureaucratic variety. If the school districts are administrative agencies rather than institutions for political representation, those who value parental rights and community control must reform the school districts or create new institutions.

The states specify the responsibilities, powers, and procedures of the school districts through constitutional provisions, legislative enactments, administrative rules, regulations, and decisions, as well as judicial verdicts and opinions (Russo 1992: 7). In New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts, the state’s control of the school systems is indirect because the municipal governments, themselves agents of the states, are in charge of the school systems (Gray and Eisinger 1991: 310).

Of the roughly 15,000 school boards in the United States today, approximately 85 percent are elective. Almost all of the elections are non-partisan. Most school boards have five to seven members (Wirt and Kirst 1992: 110). Officially, school boards have only expressed, implied, and necessary powers, some of which the states require them to exercise, and some of which they may exercise at their discretion. In most states, these powers include the power to select textbooks, set teacher salaries, decide what extracurricular activities to offer, and make decisions about the curriculum, such as how much math or foreign language instruction to offer (Russo 1992: 10; Gray and Eisinger 1991: 310). Other than ruling that the powers of school boards belong only to the board as a whole and can only be exercised at formal meetings, the courts have not interfered with the operations of school boards (Russo 1992).

Although the responsibilities and structures of school boards have not changed since the beginning of the century, changes in the social and political environment have undermined their capacity to fulfill their most basic task—balancing the state’s pursuit of public purposes with the rights of parents and the values of local communities. The rapid rate at which

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