Though I thought the recent Fordham discussion about whether school boards were a ?vital? part of 21st century education was a great one, I would not have singled out Anne Bryant, president of the National School Boards Association, as Mike did in his post, as the newest entrant into ?the pantheon of impatient reformers.?
Mike praises Bryant for taking on the unions and arguing, during the debate, that...
unions buying the school board's seat is just plain wrong. There should be the distinction between management and labor and governance, and management and labor?.? I have to admit that having the kind of situation that Gene [Maeroff, member of the panel, board member of Edison, NJ, and author of a new book on school boards] described to me about the candidates being put up by the union doesn't always get you the best school board members.
Mike's conclusion about these remarks ? that ?similar words could well have been spoken by Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, or any other dyed-in-the-wool reformer? ? are understandable, in the narrow sense that they indicate Bryant's willingness to take on union power.? But his extrapolation that those words mean that ?school boards continue to be influenced if not actually captured by the unions? and that ?there just might be a fatal flaw with elected local boards? is pushing it.
The fatal flaw here is not ?elected local boards,? but the failure of our policymakers and legislators to ensure the integrity and freedom of the elections that fill them. You don't protect democracy by taking it away.? But this signals a deeper problem here. Bryant, Maeroff, and too many other well-intentioned policy makers focus on the poor schlubs on school boards who try to "run" our school districts rather than the behemoths (unions, associations, state and federal legislators) who constantly thwart the little guys' authority.? As I argued in a post-debate post, ?one of the troubling trends in school board governance is the attempt to professionalize the institution.?? Though understandable, it is an anti-democratic impulse. Several of the Fordham panelists, as I wrote, ?expressed the need for board member `training,' [but] ?such training only adds barnacles to the bureaucracy.?
Educators need to focus on creating great schools and our governance wonks and practioners need to focus on keeping democratic governance structures just that: democratic. ?The reason that union-brokered elections don't get you the best school board members is because they have undermined the freedom of choice that is essential to our governance system. (Such choice also happens to be a wonderful ambition for our public ?schools.)
No, we need to go back to first principles here. Government ? our kind of government ? was established to protect the freedom of? individuals.? Thus the feds -- like my heroes Teddy "Trust Buster" Roosevelt and John "National Guard to Alabama" Kennedy -- should do more to make America safe for individuals to exercise their democratic right by shutting down the? monopoly interests that run our schools rather than by trying to make them in to some image of "perfect" created by the professional class.? I'm with William F. Buckley (with all due respect to my acadmic colleagues) on this one: I'd rather my school board be chosen from the Boston phone book than the Harvard staff list!
--Peter Meyer, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow
