Besieged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics

(Paperback)

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School boards are fighting for their survival. Almost everything that they do is subject to regulations handed down from city councils, state boards of education, legislatures, and courts. As recent mayoral and state takeovers in such cities as Baltimore, Chicago, and New York make abundantly clear, school boards that do not fulfill the expectations of other political players may be stripped of what few independent powers they still retain. Teachers unions exert growing influence over board decision-making processes. And with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal government has aggressively inserted itself into matters of local education governance. B esieged is the first full-length volume in many years to systematically examine the politics that surround school boards. A group of highly renowned scholars, relying on both careful case studies and quantitative analyses, examine how school boards fare when they interact with their political superiors, teachers unions, and the public. For the most part, the picture that emerges is sobering: while school boards perform certain administrative functions quite well, the political pressures they face undermine their capacity to institute the wide-ranging school reforms that many voters and local leaders are currently demanding.

Reviews

"If the intuition that academics tend to romanticize local school boards is only half right, these rigorous, fine-grained essays on one area of education politics will intrigue more than just political scientists...The data, as Howell acknowledges, are at times drawn narrowly from particular populations. But they are also carefully culled and felicitously organized...Moe takes the reader, step by step, beyond platitudes about local politics to a careful analysis of which factors may and may not limit the prima facie influence that a powerful interest group like a teachers union may have on school board elections...We learn a lot from this collection about what school board members actually do these days, and it often has little directly to do with making decision about educational policy." Stephen L. Esquith, Michigan State University, Perspectives on Politics

"This volume explores the past, present, and possible future of the school board....It is the best volume this reviewer has seen on the subject. Highly recommended." K. R. Kosar, Congressional Research Service, CHOICE

"An impressive and non-partisan overview of the realities of school control." Michael Duffy, Times Educational Supplement

Author Bio

William G. Howell is an associate professor in the Government Department at Harvard University and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard.