Mark Twain once
quipped, “God made the idiot first, for practice. Then He made the school
board.”
Nonetheless,
according to the Center for Public Education (affiliated with the National
School Boards Association, NSBA), school boards are “critical” for public
education because, at least in theory, they look out for children, incorporating
their community’s view of what students should know and be able to do; and,
perhaps most importantly, the boards are accountable to that community, acting,
in fact, as the “education watchdog” for it.
Well, especially
in that last respect, too many school boards have succeeded only too well. And,
that’s why they’ve been idiots.
Let’s recall that
school boards are the quintessential manifestation of local sovereignty. The
Bill of Rights’ 10th Amendment mandates that whatever powers The
Constitution does not explicitly give to the federal government “are reserved
to the states respectively, or to the people.” Thus, our founding fathers insisted
that education, among many other things, remain a local concern—the purview for
states and community school boards. Indeed, the fathers’ greatest fear was an
overreaching, dictatorial national government.
With good reason. Over
the last decades, the Department of Education has deftly executed a
less-than-subtle coup d’état; using, for example, federal Title I funds to blackmail
cash-starved states and school districts into implementing policies such as No
Child Left Behind and the “voluntary” Common Core Standards.
This wouldn’t have
been so catastrophic if those policies had been based upon evidence instead of
ideology. The truth is that the Department of Education has promoted market-based
“reforms” in defiance of research.
For example, in
1985, Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond documented that those
states that had adopted high-stakes standardized testing as a means of
education reform all suffered a subsequent decline in student achievement. Nonetheless,
the Bush Administration made such testing national policy. In 2009, the most
comprehensive study of charter schools (CREDO) revealed that, despite their
significant advantages, only 17% of charters outperformed their public school
counterparts, while fully 37% lagged behind. Still, the Obama Administration promoted
charters as the centerpiece of its education policy.
And all the while,
most school boards, like obedient little lap dogs, have done the bidding of the
federal government—and of the billionaires like Bill Gates who apparently
direct it and the Department of Education (Policy
Patrons, Harvard Press, 2016). School boards have bared their teeth only at
hapless superintendents and schools that failed to post high test scores, or at
least “Adequate Yearly Progress” toward them.
The result has
been disastrous, documented most eloquently in Diane Ravich’s The Death and Life of the Great American
School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education (Basic Books,
2010); in Alfie Kohn’s scathing The Case
Against Standardized Testing: Raising Scores, Ruining Schools (Heinemann,
2000); and in mine, Bloodletting: Why
Education Reform is Killing America’s Schools (Stairway Press, 2014).
My former
superintendent raged publicly against high stakes standardized testing, but
then made it her obsession, implementing practice computer-based testing
throughout the year, even for kindergarteners. She knew her job depended on
impressing the school board with high test scores.
Principals did,
too. Mine (I taught 4th grade at the time.) outlined a “balanced
day” as one focused almost exclusively on math and Language Arts (since they
were tested). History and art (since they were not) appeared at the bottom of her
list, in parenthesis, to be taught “when we found the time.” Most of my
colleagues rarely if ever did. The same narrowing of the curriculum occurred at
district middle schools, too. Meanwhile, the school board banned most field
trips, stressing how important it was to keep children in the classroom, in
their seats, prepping for tests.
That school board
was a fearsome watchdog. The trouble was, it served the federal government, not
the local community (and certainly not the students).
Now we have a new
secretary of education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, who seems intent on hastening
the demise of public education. She definitely hopes to bring her embarrassing
legacy of failed charter schools in Michigan (Arsen, 2015, Education
Trust-Midwest, 2015) to every community in the nation.
So far, the
National School Boards Association and many state counterparts (including New
York’s and mine in California) have accepted charter school expansion with nary
a whimper—this despite the mounting evidence of not only charter schools’ mixed
performance (CREDO, 2013; NCEE, 2010;), but also their disastrous effect on
school funding (Arsen, 2012; Lee-Allen, 2013), segregation (Finkenberg, 2010;
Gulosino, 2011), and teacher retention (Stuit, 2010); which is not even to
mention charter schools’ obvious violation of the separation of church and
state.
The question is,
Will the NSBA and local school boards remain so maddeningly docile? Will they enforce
even DeVos’ machinations? Or will they return to their true masters, accept
their sacred responsibility to local communities, and finally, rabidly protect
public schools and the children who cower defenseless within them?
I agree that school
boards could be critical, particularly in their role as watchdogs. If Mark
Twain was right, however, if school boards are, in fact, little more than
idiots, then Betsy DeVos will have her way with public education, just as
previous secretaries of education have had theirs.
It is long past
time for school board members and their associations to recall who elected
them, and whom they ought to serve.
David Ellison teaches history in
Union City, California.
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