Is the "educator voice" missing on charter school boards?

Fordham’s latest study, Charter School Boards in the Nation's Capital, doesn’t disappoint. Kudos to authors Juliet Squire and Allison Crean Davis (of Bellwether Education Partners) who, in tackling such a novel set of questions, have given us an array of heretofore-unknown information about the inner workings of school governance in the charter sector. While I won’t wade into every aspect of their voluminous findings, three items stood out for me, particularly with regard to what we currently know about traditional school boards.

First, charter boards are less stocked with “corporate” representation than your typical charter opponent would claim—yes, you read that correctly. Checker Finn once characterized traditional school boards as comprised mostly of politicians seeking higher office, disgruntled former school employees, and/or single-issue zealots. On the other end of the spectrum, charter opponents claim that charter schools are governed by profit seekers, big business types, and Wall Street executives rather than true “education professionals.” At least for D.C.’s charter sector, this assertion is not borne out by the data.

The table below compares occupations of traditional school board members and D.C.’s charter board members, using data from the National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) 2009 survey. (Disclosure: I performed secondary analysis on these data a few years back in a sister report for Fordham.)

Occupational comparison between traditional school boards and D.C. charter boards

*16 percent if we add Consulting to this category and 20 percent if we also add the 4 percent who are in Financial Services.

What do these comparative data show? First, D.C.’s charter school boards are dominated by current and former education professionals—comprising nearly one of every three board members! If there’s any “overrepresentation” in charter school governance, it’s that board members in D.C. are more likely to be current or former education professionals than the D.C. workforce writ large. If Congress is filled overwhelmingly with attorneys, then charter boards—just like traditional school district boards—are dominated by folks who have spent their careers in education. I make no claims about whether this is normatively good or bad, but we ought to acknowledge that current and former education professionals punch well above their weight in garnering representation on both charter and non-charter school boards.

Interestingly, D.C.’s charter sector also appears to be slightly less dominated by business types. While the occupational categories covered by the two surveys (NSBA’s and Fordham’s) are slightly different and render comparisons imperfect, even when using the widest definition of corporate representation (combining business, commerce, consulting and financial services), the worst we can say is that charter and traditional board members look nearly identical when compared to those who work in the business world. Yet the more straightforward categorical comparison that uses “business/commerce” suggests that D.C. charter boards have fewer members in the business world than do traditional boards. Moreover, D.C. charter boards appear to have a higher percentage of members who hold or held careers in the nonprofit sector.

I don’t wish to oversell or overstate the differences highlighted here. But they do dispel the notion that the “educator voice” is completely missing from charter school governance.

Second, the authors uncover a positive correlation between the level of “knowledge” that charter board members possess and the academic performance of their school. My co-author (Arnie Shober of Lawrence University) and I found no similar relationship when we examined the link between board member knowledge and academic success in traditional public school districts. This may simply be a function of the difference in surveys. Fordham’s charter survey measured “knowledge” on questions that had a definitive “right” and “wrong” answer (i.e., is your school running a budget deficit or not?), whereas the NSBA survey included knowledge questions that had a normative element (i.e., are large class sizes a pressing problem in your district?). Future researchers should revisit whether more knowledgeable board members make a positive difference for student outcomes in the traditional public school sector, using the better knowledge measures in the D.C. charter survey.

A third and final interesting nugget is the link between staff satisfaction and academic success. That is, charter boards—comprised of members who emphasize staff satisfaction when evaluating the school leader—oversee schools that, in turn, post better test scores. While the authors properly acknowledge that we cannot make causal claims here, the correlation is still pretty interesting, particularly in light of the “no excuses” reform-types who emphasize “academic achievement” above all else (including and perhaps especially “staff satisfaction”).

Critics of the non-unionized charter sector often focus on the long hours and burnout that plague charter school instructional staff. Perhaps, it is because charters are given greater autonomy to recruit, hire, manage, and fire their employees, that we see a positive relationship between charter boards’ emphasis on staff satisfaction and better school outcomes. Interestingly, Shober and I found the opposite when we examined board management in the traditional sector: There was a positive correlation between traditional district school boards that focused squarely on academic achievement—rather than staff satisfaction—and better academic outcomes. Is this difference a result of the different laws/regulations that govern employee-employer relations in the traditional versus charter sectors? It’s a question worthy of further study.

Disentangling cause and effect is difficult when it comes to questions of school governance. Still, we know far too little, even descriptively, about school governance in K–12 education, especially in the burgeoning charter sector. The Fordham-Bellwether report is a step in the right direction.

Michael Hartney is assistant professor of politics at Lake Forest College and co-author of Does School Board Leadership Matter?