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

chapter four: Direct Democracy, Indirect Democracy, and Policy Responsiveness

To what extent does policy responsiveness depend on ordinary citizens being closely involved in the formulation of tax and spending policies? Political institutions at all levels of the federal system have been designed with very different answers to this question. In his Federalist Paper 10, James Madison made a strong case against direct popular control, particularly in small polities. Larger republican governments are best, he argued, because representative bodies filter public views while a large and diverse public sphere hinders the development of majority factions. But, as Morone (1998, 6) forcefully argues, a“democratic wish”also runs through American political history. This“wish” values direct participation premised on the un-Madisonian idea that“people agree with one another.” The institutional legacy of the colonists and Progressives is built upon this premise: Direct democratic control, and in the Progressive case scientific administration as well, can fulfill these common interests. In this chapter, we consider how effectively this legacy—realized in the colonial town meeting, the Progressive independent school district, and the varieties of referendum arrangements—links the public with policy outputs. Fiscal Independence and Policy Responsiveness The most visible legacy of the Progressives’“one best system” is the organization of American public schools into independent government entities, responsible for both the financing and administration of 63 chapter four Direct Democracy, Indirect Democracy, and Policy Responsiveness schools under their jurisdiction. A smaller number are dependent, where budgetary and other decisions rest in the hands of another overlapping or coterminous level of government. In many large cities—New York and Baltimore, for example— schools are dependent on the municipal government; whereas southern states, with their strong traditions of county government, are more likely to make their school districts dependent on counties. In these cities and counties, school financing and school governance are a major responsibility of mayors and council members, who must weigh educational spending against other services such as law enforcement, fire protection, and public parks. New England has historically placed power and control in its towns, and we see that many education policies continue to be made by town governments or even multiple town governments when a single school district encompasses several. Finally, a very small number of districts are dependent upon state governments.Aside from state-dependent districts in Alaska, state dependency today arises most frequently when a troubled district is temporarily taken over by its state government.1 Table 4.1 captures some of the variety of possibilities for how a district may be dependent upon other governments and how this varies by region.2 Progressive reformers opposed all forms of dependency and advocated independent school districts as a means of distancing boards from the corrupt partisan politics of turn-of-the-century cities. This“buffering ” from “local control” (Tyack and Cuban 1995) was intended to allow independent school board members“to suppress public participation ” (McDermott 1999, 80) and separate “school policymaking from poorer neighborhoods and school government from general-purpose government”(McDermott 1999, 43–44). The Progressives believed that this independence would lead school boards to represent the public interest rather than either particular constituencies or the interests of partisan politicians. Like the council–manager form of local or city government but with even greater penetration throughout the country, independent school districts headed by professional superintendents and fairly small school 64 ten thousand DEMOCRACIES boards persist as a distinct and impressive legacy of Progressive institutional innovation. Today, 95 percent of all districts—representing about 85 percent of all students—are fiscally independent, and 90 percent of these boards operate with nine or fewer elected members (with five being the modal size). Without the need to incorporate other local or city concerns into their calculations, these school boards were expected to act with an ethos of doing“what is best for the schools”rather than through the more political calculus of partisan officeholders. By restricting themselves to the responsibility of making good school policy , they would not have to respond to demands and concerns about other aspects of community politics. The separation of school boards from the public through independence reflects well what Morone (1998, 112) sees as a“paradox”in the Progressive agenda: Independent school boards bypass“institutions that had distorted public sentiment” so that government “would be simultaneously returned to the people and placed beyond them, in the hands of experts” (p. 98). We cannot evaluate whether or not policy outcomes in...