ANALYSIS: Voters, School Boards, and Academic Achievement
It's easy to blame elected officials when school boards go off the rails. But voters would benefit from some self-reflection, and exploring new ways to evaluate the people they elect.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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The school boards in both Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg have at times in recent years shown themselves to be models of both dysfunction and passivity.
Calls for book bans and book burnings, using city transportation staff to shuttle a board member to the airport and back, and a board member bringing concerns about their adult child’s salary to the superintendent are actions that at minimum call into question board members’ judgments. At worst, their motivations for serving.
It’s easy to look at the troubles that have befallen these two boards and say, “This isn’t what we need.” The power to change the boards, however, is ultimately in the hands of voters. And a “throw the bums out” mindset isn’t likely to lead to change for the better.
While voters will always be inclined to elect people who reflect the way they think or believe, they should add a second dimension to their decision-making. Identifying candidates with the traits and personalities necessary for building healthy, functional boards.
What are those traits and characteristics?
A timely qualitative survey by Ballotpedia provides some useful insights not only into a well-functioning school board and its board members, but into dysfunctional and passive boards as well.
Three Types
The Ballotpedia study conducted one-hour interviews with 100 current and former school board members “from a wide range of districts—urban, suburban, and rural; large and small; politically diverse and politically homogeneous.”
Interviewees were questioned on a range of topics, which included:
Board conflict styles
How members see their role with respect to academic outcomes
How members see the responsibility of the board for academic outcomes
Board member goals and aspirations
Dynamics between the board, board members, and the superintendent
What board members wish both media and citizens knew about their work
In analyzing the answers, Ballotpedia identified three types of boards and their characteristics. They are:
Cohesive and Functional Boards
Divided and Dysfunctional Boards
Passive or Detached Boards
Beyond this, however, the report went into detail about the characteristics that define these boards and the people who serve on them.
Let’s dig down.
Cohesive and Functional Boards
It does not surprise that individuals serving on boards that are cohesive and functional experience low levels of conflict. More helpful is understanding why conflict is low.
Transparency, and a clear understanding of roles, are two key elements the report found for keeping conflict to a minimum.
Transparency is tied both to access to academic information necessary to help guide board members in their decision-making, and having access to senior-level individuals within the system they can turn to in order to better understand the issues the district is facing.
Understanding of roles is equally as important. The report describes it this way: “There is often a strong sense of purpose centered on improving student outcomes, with an emphasis on strategy rather than micromanagement.”
This can only happen, however, when the actors involved trust one another. As the report notes, “Trust allows for healthy dissent without dysfunction.”
Divided and Dysfunctional
The dominant trait of these boards are entrenched coalitions that routinely vote in predictable blocks. Such voting patterns suggest that decisions are based not on what’s best for students or the district, but rather on personal opinion and political dogma.
Another characteristic is that as the conflict remained steady, or worsened, the deeper into the voting process the board went. Rather than working out differences and developing solutions built around consensus, animosities worsen and make working to solve problems in a constructive manner all but impossible.
Passive
These boards take hands-off governance to the extreme, trusting the superintendent to handle everything, and rarely asking questions or attempting to introduce goals and hold the superintendent to them.
Further, these boards have little if any understanding of school programs or student outcomes.
Guiding Voters
By focusing on the characteristics of productive school boards and being aware of the traits that typify dysfunctional or passive boards, voters have a way to evaluate candidates beyond the more-common left-right divide.
Supporting candidates who demonstrate those skills — be they on the left or right — allows school boards to focus on the business at hand and not the diversions that too often steer school boards into chaos.
A school board’s primary job, for example, is supporting the superintendent (and when necessary, hiring a new superintendent) and ensuring that person is successfully leading the system in educating students. For better and worse, in Virginia there is a clear measure for defining that success — Academic performance as demonstrated on the Standards of Learning exams.
Fights over the efficacy and usefulness of SOLs, as well as the standards the tests are build around, are not issues for local school boards. Those arguments play out at the state level, not the local level.
Another job of school boards is to manage the budgets and set overall policy for the operation of the school system.
As with standards, arguments over whether public education should allow vouchers or fund religious education or create charter schools are debates that are had at the state level. It is not within the purview of school boards — in most instances — to argue for or force these policies.
By understanding what role school boards are supposed to play, voters can focus less on policy details, and more on electing candidates who are likely to work collaboratively, stay informed, and work with school leadership to reach the academic goals schools are supposed to be meeting.
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