Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts

chapter eight: The Democratic Control of American School Boards

Our tour across the landscape of local American public education has taken us through time and space. American local governments were the first to take responsibility for public education, and local control remains a strong force today despite the increasing role of the states and, in more recent years, the federal government. Indeed, localism explains quite a bit about how America’s public schools are organized, administered, and funded. But of equal importance is the accretion of institutional reforms such that contemporary school boards, school districts, and school-financing systems retain many characteristics they acquired in earlier times. American federalism allows for the rich diversity in approaches to public policy and democratic governance that we find in the American public education system. We have chosen to explore this by looking broadly at thousands of school districts in forty-nine states rather than in depth at a small number of them. There is a cost in detail and color in doing this, but we believe the benefits make it well worthwhile. We have been limited to only one policy output—per-pupil instructional expenditures—but it is a critically important one that is easily comparable across districts and is directly related to almost everything schools do. Some analysts may debate whether or not increased spending leads to higher-quality education, but they cannot deny that it matters to the teachers drawing salaries and to administrators purchasing instructional materials and deciding whether to fully fund the band or art classes. Indeed, every major actor in public school politics regards 145 chapter eight The Democratic Control of American School Boards educational spending as a key resource—perhaps the key resource— for achieving their educational goals. In the 1950s and 1960s, scholars studying policy expenditures in the American states had theoretically important insights about how demographics , political institutions, and economic resources influence public policy and democratic control; the later addition of methodologically innovative measures of public opinion opened new avenues to the study of policy responsiveness as well. We believe the same level of sophistication can be brought to the study of the thousands of local governments fulfilling a myriad of critical governmental functions. We were therefore not surprised to find—but none the less gratified—that per-pupil instructional expenditures are extremely sensitive to economic , political, and demographic inputs as well as the various institutional conditions we explored throughout the analysis. Some of these inputs are well known—for example, no scholars of school finance that we know of doubt that communities with greater financial resources spend more on their schools than communities with fewer resources. But overall, our statistical models have allowed us to go beyond economic determinism and show how political choices, institutional structures , interest groups, and public opinion also shape these decisions. The Institutional Legacy of the Progressives We have argued that the Progressive reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were particularly influential in shaping the contemporary institutional landscape of American public education . But it is useful to consider a critical lesson from Stephen Skowronek’s Building a New American State (1982): Episodes of institution building do not occur in a vacuum but rather against a backdrop of existing practices, organizations, and rules of the game.As the United States tried to build a modern administrative state, we learn in Skowronek’s masterful study, it was constrained by the existing patchwork of administration by courts and political parties. Progressive efforts to rebuild American public education in one overarching model— 146 ten thousand DEMOCRACIES the“one best system”—were more successful. Nevertheless, our system still reflects the locally based, community-run schools once prevalent in much of the country, the town meetings of New England, and the political machines of urban America. Looking across American school districts today, we find the remaining legacy of each of these, but above all we see the Progressives’ handiwork . Though fragmentation into many, often small, school districts is not uncommon, especially in metropolitan areas, overall there has been substantial consolidation into larger districts. The vast majority of school districts are governed by relatively small boards of fewer than nine or even seven members, but larger and more cumbersome ones still exist. Some school districts are still part and parcel of larger and more inclusive municipal or county governments, but most are fully independent. Tax referenda are widely used to float capital bonds, but annual budgets are...