School boards are indeed one of the messy components of democracy. Like mayors, legislators and governors (and presidents), it’s easy to come up with cogent criticisms and many instances of failure. Yet we fool ourselves if we look at only one side of the ledger, pretending or suggesting that problems will somehow disappear if we just shifted governance responsibility to some other mechanism or entity.

Currently around the nation we see increased mayoral control (e.g., NYC, Boston and Chicago), increased private market control (e.g., New Orleans), and increased control from governors or their appointees (e.g., Michigan and Detroit) – but we don’t see any actual benefits of these different approaches.

Before advocating such a switch away from school board control, we should have at least four goals in mind:
1. Responsiveness to all stakeholder voices.
2. Responsiveness to local contexts and needs.
3. Professional knowledge and competence.
4. Integrity.

For each of these four goals, I see weaknesses in the system of electing school boards. They are probably strongest when it comes to #2, with a great deal of variation for the other three goals. But I also see weaknesses regarding all four in a system of mayoral control, etc. It’s hard not to think of the old Churchill quote: “democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”

There is, however, one thing that I think we all can agree about: There are few activities less interesting than sitting through a school board meeting.

Thinking about the future role of school boards in public education leads quickly to this question: What governance structure best supports the nation’s evolving education aspirations?

American public education traces its origins to 1647, Gene Maeroff of Teachers College, Columbia University, writes in School Boards in America (2010). That year, the Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated that every town within its jurisdiction establish a public school. Committees sprang up to run the institutions. In the 1820s, the state of Massachusetts made the committees independent of local governments, establishing the model for the autonomous school districts that exist throughout the country today.

The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the Tenth Amendment, which reserved to them all powers not explicitly given to the federal government, and the states passed that authority on to local school boards, reflecting both the localistic tenor of American life and the nation’s skepticism of centralized authority. For more than a century, local boards were solely responsible for public education’s funding, standards, instruction, and results. At their height in the 1930s, during the heyday of small-town America, there were as many as 127,500 boards. Some sparsely populated states had more school board members than teachers.

But the direction of American education, and the place of the local school board in charting the course of the nation’s students, changed dramatically in the early 1980s, when the federally appointed National Commission on Excellence in Education and other reform voices argued that public education’s tradition of stressing low-level academics and vocational training for many students was no longer sufficient. The rise of the postindustrial economy—with its requirement for brains over brawn—and the nation’s recently forged commitment to racial equality required that the kind of rigorous academic curriculum traditionally reserved for the few now be taught to the many, they argued.

It was an epochal shift in public education’s mission, one that we’ve been struggling to achieve for three decades. But entrusting the task to local school boards, it became clear by the late 1980s, was not going to yield the academic results the nation needed. Since then, national and state leaders have increasingly imposed the new expectations directly, holding schools responsible for their students’ performance, introducing national standards, and devising uniform tests—each step further distancing the country from its long tradition of local control. In 2008, commentator Matt Miller aptly characterized the idea of relying on local school boards to meet today’s educational challenges: “It’s as if after Pearl Harbor, FDR had suggested we prepare for war through the uncoordinated efforts of thousands of small factories.”

With the nation’s pursuit of equality of educational opportunity far from fulfilled and with workers increasingly competing for jobs with their counterparts around the world, we need to define public education’s aspirations nationally rather than locally. That means a new and less influential role in education goal-setting and policymaking for today’s 13,600 remaining public school boards.

A longer take on school boards here.

There may still be some places in America--most likely tranquil suburbs and small towns--where the elected local school board places kids' interests first and attract the community's leading citizens to engage in selfless policymaking on behalf of the commonweal. That was, more or less, the theory behind elected school boards--that plus the fact that when they were "invented" the local community covered nearly all the costs of its schools.

But there cannot be many such places today and you surely will not find them in urban America. In those places, the elected school board is generally dominated by (a) aspiring politicians for whom this is a stepping stone to higher office, (b) friends of the teachers union (often retired teachers themselves) dedicated to ensuring that the grownups' interests come first, and (c) individuals with various single-minded causes and grudges that they seek to impose on the entire community.

If you want chapter and verse, as well as provocative alternative approaches to governing our schools, check out Andy Smarick's excellent new book, "The Urban School System of the Future", now available from Rowman & Littlefield. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781607094760 And look forward to Paul Manna's and Pat McGuinn's terrific "Education Governance for the Twenty-first Century", forthcoming from the Brookings Press, which you will doubtless want to get everyone for Christmas. http://www.brookings.edu/research/books/2012/educationgovernanceforthetwentyfirstcentury